When Cancer Is Forgotten

Consider if thou wilt, this dialogue in a doctor’s office.

Patient: I’ve been feeling a bit of stomach pain lately.
Doctor: Is it more round the front or the back?
Patient: The back.
Doctor: Have you been feeling down lately? Any trouble sleeping?
Patient: Yes.
Doctor: And I also see you’re a bit yellow and have lost a few kilos since your last visit.
Patient: I seem to have a lower appetite compared to the usual.
Doctor: Any nausea?
Patient: Sometimes
Doctor: Vomiting?
Patient: No, I’m not that sick!
Doctor: Let me do a quick test. Just put your finger into the machine…[Looks at digital readout of blood sample that's been taken]. Well this is interesting! You have something called “cancer”. Or rather, a type of cancer called “pancreatic cancer”.
Patient: Is it serious?
Doctor (laughs): Oh god no! Just take this nanopill this afternoon and you’ll be all cleared up by tomorrow morning.
Patient: And then?
Doctor: It might find some of these so-called “cancers” in other parts of the body and deal with them. In any case, come back in a week so I can see how you go and maybe you’ll need a second nanopill to complete the treatment.
Patient: Thanks. I’ve never heard of “cancer” before.
Doctor: You wouldn’t have, it’s usually treatable with a single nanopill.

You might react to this in many ways but I think if I read this I might feel almost a sense of outrage. Those people-of-the-future are treating cancer (especially pancreatic cancer) so casually, it feels almost callous! Like an insult to the tens and hundreds of millions that have suffered and died from cancer. An inadvertent insult but an insult nonetheless.

This is normal when looking into a future where a devastating disease is a thing of the past. But there’s a counterpart: this dialogue actually happens today too. Just read it again substituting something like tuberculosis for pancreatic cancer. Sure, it’s a bit exaggerated (since tuberculosis isn’t that easily treated), but still…

The interplay between looking backward (our casual disregard for some diseases) and forward (casual disregard by people of the future) is interesting. It shows the extent to which we are biased by the times we live in. When typing the dialogue above, I originally had the doctor say this at the end: “But believe it or not, it was one of the leading causes of death just a century ago. In fact your form, pancreatic cancer, was a definite death sentence, with a 95% chance of dying within 5 years!” The way they discuss the horrors of past (ie. our present) like this was supposed to show their complacency. But then I realised they’d probably be even more complacent — none of it would even warrant a mention! It’s not like a modern doctor is likely to tell you how bad a certain disease was 200 years ago or how likely you were to die from it.

On the one hand, this is a problem. Part of the reason the anti-vaccine movement is so tenacious is that vaccines have become too successful. Industrialised nations have been swept clean of the scourges of smallpox, malaria, whooping cough etc so successfully that it becomes easy to think vaccines don’t do that much and giving them up isn’t so bad. So perhaps the doctor in the dialogue should have told his patient how serious pancreatic cancer was. Perhaps our doctors should tell us the same.

On the other hand, this seems an essential element of human nature. Living through something like smallpox and its eradication — with all of its emotional side effects — gives a wisdom that humans today just can’t reach just by looking at statistics. It’s hard to remember pain even if the improvement has just happened. I’ve just been put on a new asthma drug that’s been out for 5 years but that I haven’t used since I’ve mismanaged my asthma. It is like night and day. Whereas before I couldn’t imagine that easy breathing could be this normal, today it’s the default. I can’t easily imagine what it was like before — and I don’t want to. So I can imagine how much more it fades away when the change happens over generations.t

Humanity would be greatly benefited by radically increasing the lifespan of at least SOME people. That way we can get the input of people who have lived through such revolutions. Until then, it seems that we do medical research so that future generations have the luxury of forgetting our sufferings and trivialising them. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.