Oncology Quotes

“The standard treatments for cancer are not meant to heal, but to destroy.”
― Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not a Disease - It's a Survival Mechanism

“If your loved one is done fighting, respect that, let them go.”
― Lynda Wolters, Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need

“The word cure is often misconstrued as remission and, conversely, remission is often thought to mean cure. Unfortunately, those words are mutually exclusive and can be painful when misunderstood or misused.”
― Lynda Wolters, Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need

“Cancer - a more or less permanent traffic jam in the body.”
― Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not a Disease - It's a Survival Mechanism

“Cancer can change your body, and it can surely take your body away, but it can't have your spirit.”
― Lynda Wolters, Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need

“I am angry that everyone else gets to have a normal life.”
― Lynda Wolters, Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need

“The failure to accept cancer as a systemic disease is one of the greatest failures in modern medicine.”
― Michael Lam, Beating Cancer with Natural Medicine

“La ciencia encarna el deseo humano de entender la naturaleza; la tecnología conjuga ese deseo con la ambición de controlarla.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“En el folclore de la ciencia hay una historia muchas veces contada sobre el momento del descubrimiento: la aceleración del pulso, la luminosidad espectral que adquieren hechos comunes y corrientes, el segundo de parálisis y arrebato en que las observaciones cristalizan y encajan en patrones, como piezas de un caleidoscopio. La manzana cae del árbol. El hombre sale de un salto de la bañera. La escurridiza ecuación cuadra.

Pero hay otro momento de descubrimiento -su antítesis- que se menciona contadas veces: el descubrimiento de un fracaso. Es un momento, que por lo común, el científico conoce en soledad.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“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, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

“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

“True hope has no room for delusion.”
― Jerome Groopman, The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness

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

“To begin the ending, we must end the beginning. Prevention will be the only compassionate, universally applicable cure. It is not prevention through lifestyle changes. Individuals with pristine eating and exercising habits get cancer because cancer-causing mutations accumulate as natural consequences of reproduction and aging of cells. The new strategy must go beyond early detection as practiced currently through mammograms and other routine screening tests. The prevention I am talking about is through identification and eradication of transformed cancerous cells at their inception, before they have had a chance to organize into a bona fide malignant, incurable disease. This may seem an unattainable, utopian dream, but it is achievable in a reasonable time. We are already using sophisticated technology to detect the residues of disease that linger after treatment, the last cancer cell. Can we not reverse the order of things and use the tests to detect the first?”
― Azra Raza, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last

“There is one and only one goal for all of us—to ensure that all our intellectual efforts are directed toward the relief of humanity’s suffering.”
― Azra Raza, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last

“The vast majority of researchers are studying diseases they never see, in animals who don’t get them spontaneously, or in test tubes where the “cancer” must be artificially created and maintained.”
― Azra Raza, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last

“I cannot stress this enough times; scientists need to stop making more and more artificial mouse models and tissue culture cell lines for cancer drug development. These resources can and should be invested in better pursuits. No one, however, willingly surrenders their pet projects, no matter how far they have drifted from the original intent, as long as they can maintain their grip on grants and power.”
― Azra Raza, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last

“We should not be aiming for weeks of improved survival. Our goals should be higher. The public needs to see how far we have drifted from the original aims as oncologists and researchers and at what cost to the patient.”
― Azra Raza, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last

“...cancer is not a disease of -modern- times, but environmental changes can shift tissue-specific cancer risks. However, the overall consensus, in both fields of palaeo-oncology and evolutionary medicine, has been that cancer prevalence in human societies has increased significantly in the most recent period of our history, suggesting support for the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Cancer if often referred to as a -disease of modernity-, suggesting that recent lifestyle and environmental factors are mostly responsible for this disease burden. However, comparative data on cancer prevalence suggests that the disease is evolutionarily ancient and has been a health issue for almost all multicellular animals.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach

“Cancer is often referred to as a -disease of modernity-, suggesting that recent lifestyle and environmental factors are mostly responsible for this disease burden. However, comparative data on cancer prevalence suggests that the disease is evolutionarily ancient and has been a health issue for almost all multicellular animals.”
― Kimberly A. Plomp, Palaeopathology and Evolutionary Medicine: An Integrated Approach