In my quest to reframe the narrative on Cancer, I sometimes feel that there are few voices in the media that support my views. How refreshing, then, when a friend points me in the direction of a piece like this brief podcast. It takes the edge off the words blazing across the publications set out at the oncology waiting rooms across the nation.
I am not saying that patients are not allowed to view themselves as survivors if that is somehow empowering to them and their particular struggle, but the term is another example of the “war metaphor” that dominates the dialogue and casts the cancer “battle” in a negative, pre-defeated light.
Like too many things in our media culture, the narrative on cancer has been driven in a lazy and convenient fashion for many years. Certainly when the War on Cancer was declared by President Nixon over 40 years ago, it was an apt analogy. Cancer research was still in its relative infancy, even after half a century of good scientific inquiry and thousands of years of anecdotal analysis, folk medicine and traditional therapies being attempted. Since 1971, the story has been changing, evolving on an almost constant basis.
