Oncology Quotes

Still, for the moment he was keeping quiet about his interest in cancer. "You have to realize, cancer was a devastating disease," said Druker. "Everybody died." The disease was a grim, dark domain where only the most morbid physician dared tread, and Druker was unwilling to admit, even to himself, that he was fascinated by it. "Everybody was afraid of it, and people in oncology [were] weird because this disease was so hopeless," he recalled. "Why would you go take care of patients with no hope? You were crazy if you were going to do that. ~ Jessica Wapner

It felt - nearly twenty-five hundred years after Hippocrates had naively coined the overarching term karkinos - that modern oncology was hardly any more sophisticated in its taxonomy of cancer. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

We add to the most ideal course of cancer treatment in light of the one of a kind qualities of a patient's case. ~ Cancercenter

Cancer - a more or less permanent traffic jam in the body. ~ Andreas Moritz

But in 1960, oncology was not yet ready for this proposal. Not until several years later did it strike the board that had fired Li so hastily that the patients he had treated with the prolonged maintenance strategy would never relapse. This strategy--which cost Min Chiu Li his job--resulted in the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

The cure of even one solid cancer in adults, Farber knew, would singularly revolutionize oncology. It would provide the most concrete proof that this was a winnable war. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I think I want to go in to law or oncology, as those are both subjects that really interest me, but my parents say that I should be a politician since I am so good at arguing! ~ Joshua Rush

The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy. ~ Andreas Moritz

A St. Louis oncology nurse quoted Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl to States News Service in 2012: " 'What is to give light must endure burning.' I think people who care for others understand. Caregiving is painful. ~ Alexandra Robbins

Sure smokers have made personal choices. And they pay for those choices every day, whether sitting through an airline flight dyingfor a smoke, or dying for a smoke in the oncology wing of a hospital. The tobacco companies have not paid nearly enough for the killing. ~ Anna Quindlen

Most medical physicists work in the physics of radiation oncology making sure that the desired dose is given to the cancer and the dose to normal tissues are minimized. ~ John Cameron

As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology . . . But when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day ~ Alain De Botton

We trust that coordinating physical and enthusiastic consideration amid tumor treatment is fundamental to effective results. ~ Cancercenter

I was in my early forties the first time I visited an oncology ward for terminal patients. I was apprehensive, as I was going to the front lines of a battle the our culture labors mightily to keep hidden, but I needed to visit a friend. I did not expect that the ward would be an apocalypse in the literal sense of the word--an unmasking or uncovering. The intensity of misery was overwhelming, yet it did not frighten or repel me, for I had entered holy ground. People my own age, as well as the elderly, were shockingly frail and needed support just to totter down the hall. Still, they were alive, and walking, saying their goodbyes to friends, children, and grandchildren. What struck me was that the atmosphere was not merely one of sadness, but also one of beauty deepened by the sobering inevitability of death, and blessed by the presence of vibrant love. While the relentless activity of New York City surrounded us, here everything unessential had been stripped away. Only life remained, a gift and a joy beyond our understanding. I had arrived in the real world. ~ Kathleen Norris

Fasting before chemotherapy is definitely something that should be implemented in our oncology wards, ~ Timothy Ferriss

Since cancer is an anaerobic growth, enhancing aerobic metabolism in a cancer patient is like shining daylight on a vampire. ~ Patrick Quillin

It's normally agreed that the question "How are you?" doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, "A bit early to say." (If it's the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, "I seem to have cancer today.") Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of "life" when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask... It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body. But it's not really possible to adopt a stance of "Don't ask, don't tell," either. Like its original, this is a prescription for hypocrisy and double standards. Friends and relatives, obviously, don't really have the option of not making kind inquiries. One way of trying to put them at their ease is to be as candid as possible and not to adopt any sort of euphemism or denial. The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thin ~ Christopher Hitchens