The language crisis in cancer care — and how we can do better

The way we talk about cancer is not just words. Language shapes how patients see themselves, how families respond, how workplaces act, and even how healthcare is delivered. Right now, much of it is letting patients down.

War metaphors like 'fighting' and 'battling' cancer, combined with 'survivor' labels, create unrealistic expectations and harmful gaps in understanding. These words suggest cancer has clear winners and losers, definitive endings, and that treatment means returning to 'normal'. The reality is far more complex.

More fundamentally, war metaphors cast our bodies as battlefields and cancer as an external enemy, when cancer actually results from compromised immune systems and internal environments that need restoration, not defeat.

What goes wrong

• Recurrence risks: patients finish treatment unaware that cancer can return locally or spread to other organs, unable to take protective action or monitor for changes.

• Younger women in treatment-induced menopause: rarely informed or prepared for what's coming, and left without clear care or guidance.

• Advanced cancer patients: excluded from 'survivor’ narratives, invisible in workplaces, unsupported in society.

• Workplaces: assume people bounce back unchanged after treatment, failing to provide reasonable adjustments and driving skilled professionals to resign or retire early.

• Healthcare: creates the illusion acute treatment is the end, leaving patients unprepared for ongoing side effects and the deeper work of restoring balance in their bodies

• Treatment choices: lack of clear information about treatment impacts and risks forces patients to decide from fear rather than informed choice.

What we need instead

• More accurate language that reflects cancer as often a chronic, ongoing condition requiring management, not a battle with winners and losers.

• More inclusive narratives that recognise everyone: those with advanced disease, those in menopause after treatment, those living long-term with uncertainty.

• Better education so patients understand the root causes of cancer, recognise recurrence signs, and use their agency to address these causes and restore balance.

• Workplaces of the future: adapting to retain talent, supporting people through treatment and beyond, and recognising cancer as a long-term condition under the Equality Act (UK).

• Healthcare that empowers: moving from paternalism to collaboration, equipping patients with knowledge to make informed decisions about quality of life, not just longevity.

• Societal understanding: language that helps families, friends, and communities better support people with cancer, while preparing everyone for the reality that cancer may one day touch their lives too.

As someone who's navigated this personally and professionally studied the impact of language on healing, I created my Rethinking Cancer Language series to explore how words fail us patients, and how reframing them could transform not just patient experiences, but also the way society, workplaces, and healthcare respond.

Read the series here:

• Part 1: The problem with cancer survivor labels

• Part 2: Why war cancer language might be harming us

• Part 3: Are we fighting cancer or the treatment?

• Part 4: What if cancer isn't the enemy but the messenger?

  
  

Because words don't just describe reality, they create it. And right now, we have the power to choose words that include, support, and empower.