Cancerphobia is as strong as ever, experts say, even as mortality falls. When celebrities like Britain’s Princess Catherine fall ill, it can up the general fear factor. Let’s start with the good news: Cancer deaths are down, almost one-third since 1991, according to the American Cancer Society.
And now the bad: Cancer fear is not. In fact, experts say cancerphobia seems as strong as ever, even as mortality falls. Why is that? Part of the reason, says Jessy Levin, an attending psychologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, is because we’re much more open about talking about all our maladies, including cancer , these days.
More openness means less stigma, which is good, but the frequent stories about prominent cases - among them King Charles , Princess Catherine and actress Olivia Munn - can up the fear factor. When it comes to cancer, we have a lot of fears: about treatment and its side effects , pain and suffering, radiation and recurrence , impotence and infertility , and of course the biggest one, dying. Some of these fears are now overstated or outdated, thanks to medical advances.
Still, there’s a reason the oncologist and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee called cancer the “emperor of all maladies” and why it tops lists of the diseases we fear the most, even if it’s not the biggest killer (that “honour” goes to cardiovascular disease ). It is widely thought of as a “vicious, unpredictable, and indestructible enemy,” which is how a systematic revi.