The steep price tag of cancer treatment needs to continue to be a part of the national conversation, not just the patient-doctor one.
Interpretation
Cancer treatment costs should be openly discussed in society, not limited to conversations between patients and doctors.
Suleika Jaouad emphasizes the importance of bringing the conversation about the high costs of cancer treatment into the public sphere. She believes that these discussions shouldn't be restricted to private settings between patients and their doctors, but rather should involve society at large to foster awareness and understanding of the economic burdens of cancer care.
In practice
In a panel discussion on healthcare reform, this quote can highlight the economic aspects of cancer care.
After my diagnosis at age 22 with leukemia, the second piece of news I learned was that I would likely be infertile as a result of chemotherapy. It was a one-two punch that was my first indication that issues of cancer and sexual health are inextricably tied.
Just a few years ago, at the age of 22, I learned I had an aggressive form of leukemia. I needed intensive chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant to save my life. Back then, my doctors told me that I had a 35 percent chance of surviving my transplant.
When I was diagnosed with cancer at age 22, I learned just how much cancer affects families when it affects individuals.
I remember my first day of chemo as if it were yesterday, hanging up my favorite summer dress like an athlete retiring a jersey. Within a few weeks, my waist had shrunk to a double zero - the size it was when I was in the sixth grade. My cheek bones jutting out. Rings under my eyes. Skin the color of chalk.
In my darkest days in the oncology unit, I promised myself that if I ever got into remission one day, I would become a stronger, healthier and better version of my precancer self.
Today, my brother and I share almost identical DNA, the result of a successful bone marrow transplant I had last April using his healthy stem cells. But Adam and I couldn't be more different.
People with HIV are still stigmatized. The infection rates are going up. People are dying. The political response is appalling. The sadness of it, the waste.
Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited-though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air-of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.
A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth and promotes scrofula, rickets, etc., among the children. People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill, they cannot get well again in it.
Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.
AIDS is no longer a death sentence for those who can get the medicines. Now it's up to the politicians to create the "comprehensive strategies" to better treat the disease.
The physician should not treat the disease but the patient who is suffering from it
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