What Is Cancer Culture?

Before diving in, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to everyone. I appreciate how many things compete for your attention. And yet, you chose to spend a few minutes thinking about cancer. Very cool.

These past few weeks have been crazy with the podcast wrapping up, being featured by The Guardian, talking with Anne Helen Peterson about why we are so weird about cancer AND a live interview on NPR. Oh, and I recently started a new job.

In the midst of all of this, I’m preparing for a talk in Paris and thinking about the next year of Cancer Culture. Where will we go? What will we talk about? How will this conversation evolve?

For those of you who are new, a bit about me: I grew up on a farm in Illinois, moved to North Carolina for college, travelled around a bit, and settled back in North Carolina. I’ve worked at large, urban cancer centers and small community hospitals.

After a decade in clinical practice, I realized that I was having the same conversation over and over in my exam rooms. Patients consistently expressed a gap in what they (or the people around them) expected cancer to be and what it actually was. I realized that if I was hearing this from so many patients, it was probably on the minds of more people out there.

And maybe if I brought cancer out of the shadows and into the light, I could shift the conversation from fear and dread to understanding and even hope. For any cancer survivors or care partners, I hope these posts will ring true to your experience.

Thank you again for being here and if you like what you read, please share this post with a friend. Cancer will touch all of us, so we need as many people at this table as possible. We are not afraid of hard conversations. And we are eager to change the conversation around cancer.

To familiarize yourself with my writing and this community, I’ve provided a few links to popular posts below. I invite you to read, comment, share and contemplate how we can all move forward in creating a better culture around cancer. I’m looking forward to doing that with you.

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Getting to Know Cancer Culture

A great place to start is by listening to my docuseries on the life of Dr. Bernard Fisher. All six episodes of Less Radical are available now. It’s perfect binge listening for a weekend drive or upcoming holiday travel. We are approaching 10K downloads (!!!). I was interviewed on NPR last week to talk about Dr Fisher and cancer in general.

My most popular post is an essay I wrote about why doctors are leaving medicine. A recent survey indicates that 1 in 5 doctors are planning to leave medicine in the next 5 years. Why spend all that time in school just to leave a profession we love? I’ll give you a hint. It’s not the patients!

I also write about you, my patients. About what I’ve learned in twenty years of sitting across from patients and caregivers coping with cancer. Sometimes, I share these lessons along with data like in this article which should be assigned reading for every new doctor.

And finally, I sometimes invite trusted experts to provide insight into a particular topic. Julie Lanford (aka The Cancer Dietitian) did exactly that when she wrote this post about diet and cancer.

I encourage you to check out the Cancer Culture chat where I post questions and resources pertinent to this community. I invite you to do the same.

Once again, thank you for being here. I look forward to hearing from you!