First Grousing from a survivor: Please stop kindly hurting cancer patient

Today is Cancer Day, and today I decided to be my first GROUSING on this subject to help you to correctly and respectfully treat cancer patient. By you I mean you cancer-free family, friends, clients, colleagues… I’m certain that you did it but you never though it was a violence. So take 5 minutes to read the rest and avoid hurting by thinking you’re doing well.

During my experience as a cancer patient I felt violated mostly everyday. I’m not writing this article to blame any of you because you were acting with good intention knowing little on the subject and having petite knowledge on how to deal with someone fighting the death. There are many ways to support someone going through cancer treatment but recommending pseudo-scientific treatments read on Facebook post or seen in one of the stupid TV Channels isn’t one of them.

For the love of reason and decency, by respect to the humanity, don’t tell someone with cancer that if they’d just drink lemon juice[1], or take vitamins, or pray or have a “positive attitude” that they could cure themselves. Let’s put aside for a moment that none of these claims have been validated by peer-reviewed science, and that none of them are true. Juice is no more a magical answer to illness than the Gerson method’s[2] demand for people who are sick to eat raw[3] calf liver or shove coffee grounds into their rectums.

Let’s also put aside that a variety of modern medical procedures (including chemotherapy, radiation, radiofrequency ablation, cryoablation and surgery) plus inexplicable luck helped keep some cancer patients (including my aunty Zeined died 2 months ago) alive for many years more than expected, and that they died despite having well-developed senses of spirituality, nutrition, humor and tenacity.

Let’s instead confront the three reasons I think it’s an act of violence every time someone suggests a simplistic, unproven and fantastic cure for cancer.

Reason 1: It’s condescending. If lemon juice really cured cancer, don’t you think that lemonade would be traded on Wall Street and hedge funds would be peddling lemon-flavored credit default swaps? More importantly, when someone has had cancer for months or years, maybe living through hours of doctor appointments, days in hospitals and months in bed, don’t you think they’ve had time to consider every possible option with the seriousness their own mortality deserves?

Reason 2: It could be argued that people giving advice are just trying to “do something” and kindly offer help. But I reject this: if you want to do something to help someone in distress, as George Carlin[4] famously riffed, unplug his or her clogged toilet or paint the garage. Don’t tell a sick or injured person what they should do, because it’s a sneaky and harmful way of dealing with your own fear of death. You’re saying “I wouldn’t let this happen to me the way you’ve let it happen to you.”

Reason 3: Giving advice to people with cancer blames the sick person for your discomfort with their reality and shifts any accountability you feel back on to them. As the authors Barbara Ehrenreich[5] and Sarah Schulman[6] have shown, we have ethical responsibilities to the vulnerable in our communities, and we find excuses to avoid them. Having cancer or caring for someone with it understandably causes fear, anxiety and depression. Expecting someone to have a Positive Attitude when they are facing mortality, or telling them they’ve missed a simplistic way they could have avoided their fate, further isolates and shuns them.

As anthropologist S. Lochlain Jain wrote in Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us[7], “the huge and punishing self-help industry preys on fear and ads guilt to the mix. As one woman with metastatic colon cancer said on a retreat I attended, ‘maybe I haven’t laughed enough.’” Talking at someone with cancer about what they should do, rather than being with them in a morass with no easy answers, is not you helping them. It is you unfairly shaming them for having failed at self-help, which isn’t even a thing.

Key Takeaway It is hard to be with people in grief. It is hard to be with people who are facing death, or with their caregivers. The next time you are, don’t give them stupid advice they aren’t stupid. Trust they’ve given more thought to their course of treatment than you did by reading that Facebook post. Trust yourself to just be with them in the unknown. Trust yourself to love them in the condition they’re in, instead of ignorantly and egotistically giving useless advice that won’t ultimately change their prognosis. One of the last and most frightening lessons I learned with my friend Act (died exactly one year ago) in her final days was the importance of being with another when there is nothing to say or do. It is terrifying to just be with a loved one and to admit you’re powerless to stop their death. But it can be the most powerful, quiet and loving gift you can give each other. I hope my first grousing helped a little and you are looking forward to the next one.

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[1] http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/lemons.asp

[2] http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/cancer.html

[3] http://www.chrisbeatcancer.com/the-raw-vegan-diet/

[4] https://achaabdan.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/george-carlin-used-comedy-to-preach-his-views-on-death/

[5] Barbara Ehrenreich authors of a brilliant book Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

[6] Another great book by Sarah Schulman Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

[7] This book will help family and friends to be the best supporter to their loved one. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us

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