Oh boy. Here's more "feel good" language change suggestions.
No. Just not. This kind of thing is extremely hypocritical and insulting to all those who are actually fighting cancer. Both the patients, the doctors and research teams.
>Cure seems like a goal that isn't realistic anymore.
Where did you get that from? Both cure and 5 year survival rates are higher than ever and are slowly encroaching advanced stages of cancer.
>And we need to make sure he doesn't think he lost anything. Its not fair and its incorrect.
Except it is. He lost his life. This is a fact. Language won't change it. Pretending that he didn't lose anything is more insulting to him and his family than not. Respecting his choice is different from pretending that he didn't lose everything.
I've seen people give up and accept their low chances of survival. It's very rare. More often than not I see people who want to live and exhaust every option available until the last minute of their lives. This is literally a fight and these people would punch you in the face if your righteousness suggested otherwise in front of them. And it blows my mind that a doctor( are you an actual doctor? In the States the term doctor isn't regulated so a chiro can call themselves doctor) doesn't see that the field is rapidly improving with better and more options all the time. Now more than ever before it's worth fighting to your last minute in case new therapies arrive that have great results for you.
> I've seen people give up and accept their low chances of survival. It's very rare.
This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life.
I don't have any issue with the "fight" language, but the associations I make are to the body's fight with the disease, not the patient's actions.
In general though, all this talk of "fight", "battle", "never giving up", etc, strikes me as being somewhat American (in a pejorative sense of the term) -— it bespeaks an immature relationship with death.
>This strikes me as being normatively loaded in a way that's unhelpful, at a minimum. There's a cost-benefit analysis that has to take place by patients and their families and there's a choice to be made between optimizing for length of life and quality of life.
That's what a person who isn't in that position would think. In reality most people just want to live. So it's as much of a fight as a non-combat situation can be. And there is literally a battle between the cancer and your body going on.
>In general though, all this talk of "fight", "battle", "never giving up", etc, strikes me as being somewhat American (in a pejorative sense of the term) -— it bespeaks an immature relationship with death.
And I'm not even american. I don't think there's anything wrong with people wanting to live and get rid of a fairly "unfair" disease. Because cancer can indeed be unfair in many cases. An e.g. smoker knows it's probably coming. But the very nature of cancer as a probabilistic disease means some people get the sort end of the stick without bringing it on themselves.
>Death is a very personal thing. Would you tell the author of TFA that they are "giving up?"
Tell it to them? No. When the treatment effort starts, you make it clear that they can drop off the therapy at any time they want. When and if that happens you sugar coat it as much as you can and help them make peace with the world and their families etc. At that point no benefit will come to the patient from telling them the truth.
But it totally matters when discussing e.g. health policies or future directions of treatments. These people do actually give up and we should face that. We should ask what parts of our current treatment methods are the most unbearable and how we can improve those in the future. How to better approach the patients from the beginning. Things like that.
No. Just not. This kind of thing is extremely hypocritical and insulting to all those who are actually fighting cancer. Both the patients, the doctors and research teams.
>Cure seems like a goal that isn't realistic anymore.
Where did you get that from? Both cure and 5 year survival rates are higher than ever and are slowly encroaching advanced stages of cancer.
>And we need to make sure he doesn't think he lost anything. Its not fair and its incorrect.
Except it is. He lost his life. This is a fact. Language won't change it. Pretending that he didn't lose anything is more insulting to him and his family than not. Respecting his choice is different from pretending that he didn't lose everything.
I've seen people give up and accept their low chances of survival. It's very rare. More often than not I see people who want to live and exhaust every option available until the last minute of their lives. This is literally a fight and these people would punch you in the face if your righteousness suggested otherwise in front of them. And it blows my mind that a doctor( are you an actual doctor? In the States the term doctor isn't regulated so a chiro can call themselves doctor) doesn't see that the field is rapidly improving with better and more options all the time. Now more than ever before it's worth fighting to your last minute in case new therapies arrive that have great results for you.