A searing pain of illness is the pain of seeing sadness or helplessness in the eyes of those who love you.

We call them “doctors’ orders.” You know, “Take these pills” or “Wear this splint.” It’s a terrible term. I prefer “doctors’ recommendations.”

It’s disruptive and distressing to lose things all the time, whether from cancer-related cognitive deficits, dementia, overload with life stress, grief, or any other reason. Here are some tips to decrease the risk of losing things

The challenges of life after cancer may include “losing things” all the time. This is not the occasional losing things of healthy busy people, but a pervasive problem with losing things throughout the day, every day.

Losing things can be a big deal during and after an illness like cancer. Besides disrupting your day, losing things may…

What’s the big deal about yet another cancer walk? To answer, let me take you back to 1993.

Is “hope for a miracle” a healing hope? The answer begins….

Susan Gubar opens her latest post on the NYTimes Living With Cancer blog with “I’ve been lucky that most of my care is delivered with tenderness.” The “most” signals…

AS AN INTERNIST, I strived to give patients hope by prescribing therapies that increased their chance—their hope—of the best outcome and by encouraging them with hopeful words. My own hope was to care for patients until I was old.

Patients with no firsthand knowledge of Paul Allen’s medical situation are offering explanations of what likely happened. On one blog, a follow-up commenter wondered if Allen’s doctors had made a mistake.

Seems everyone’s an expert these days, which can add to patients’ distress.

After being a nurse for 22 years and an oncology nurse for 12, Susan Sayles, MS, RN, OCN, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. Since completing her treatment, she’s been encouraging other breast cancer patients …

A physician's heart may be in the right place while reassuring a patient, "Don't worry. It'll be nothing." Unfortunately, trying to spare patients worry during evaluations can backfire. Patients who are reassured and then find out they have a serious illness may suffer from...

In my last post, I used the example of a false alarm to illustrate how joy can come out of illness. That wasn't the best example, given how the joyful relief of a false alarm can be mixed with anger, embarrassment, self-doubt and other uncomfortable emotions. 

I don't like that I got cancer. Still, many good things have come out of the illness experience. Many joyful moments have happened because of my illness.

I must have been quite a sight, hobbling from display to display on crutches while taking my med-school anatomy final. I remember thinking how much I hated those crutches. Almost forty years later, I rely on a variety of crutches to manage aftereffects of past cancer therapies and (how great to write this) the effects of aging. I love each and every crutch.

I'm reading a popular new book that lambasts screening tests and the medical community that recommends them. Meanwhile, I just read an article put out by the University of Missouri, reporting "A team led by University of Missouri psychological science researchers has determined that patients may want cancer screenings even if the potential harms outweigh the benefits."

What is going on? Why would anyone abandon effective cancer screening tests? Why would anyone want screening tests they've been told are harmful and not helpful?  

An extraordinary woman offers wisdom to all us ordinary people. Colon cancer recently ended her life, but not before she left us words of wisdom in her blog and