Cancer is a traumatic diagnosis and the first reaction of a patient is often to run away from reality, to deny the diagnosis or to search online for answers to the dozens of questions that arise upon learning the diagnosis. But the online environment, particularly social media, is full of myths and false information that obstruct the chances of treatment and healing. Dr. Tudor Mocan, gastroenterologist, makes a series of clarifications and provides information aimed at dispelling myths by offering a real perspective on this diagnosis.
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When doctors have suspicions of a cancer diagnosis in a patient, they usually ask him for a series of investigations that will shed light on the definite diagnosis of cancer. The surest way to find out the actual diagnosis is to perform a biopsy.
All well and good, but when a patient hears about a biopsy, a whole story emerges around it, a story that, in short, translates into the myth of the biopsy spreading cancer and the refusal to do it. "I have often heard patients telling me that we don't do a biopsy because the cancer spreads through it. What cancer? We do not know if it is cancer at this point. This is what we are trying to find out. The biopsy remains the most reliable method of definite diagnosis, not only for liver cancers, which is what I mainly deal with, but for any type of cancer.”
Another prejudice that circulates among patients, is that if they are operated on for cancer, they surely do not have long to live or that their cancer will spread all over their bodies. This myth often arises from a real situation, but which has a different cause. The patient has already an extremely advanced form of cancer that the CT or MRI did not reveal, and the doctor sees this during the operation, realising that the situation is much worse than the analyses and that the tumour cannot be not extirpated at all. So the reality is not that the surgery spreads the cancer, but that it was already so spread that nothing more can be done. "A cancer is not formed during an operation in any way. On the contrary, the operation prolongs a patient’s life or saves it. Many people spread this myth because of the grief they felt at the loss of a loved one, forgetting to mention that the person had multiple end-stage metastases. People took the first part - the idea of surgery and the last part - if the patient was in the terminal phase - and launched the myth of the operation that spreads the cancer.
Real case. 34-year-old patient diagnosed with liver metastases four to five months ago, came to me for a second opinion and learned that, in fact, he does not have liver cancer. If by chance he had followed a naturopathic treatment during the four to five months he lived with this diagnosis of liver cancer, and now he had gone to the doctor for a check-up, what would have been the conclusion? He was cured of cancer through natural methods. The reality was that the patient was misdiagnosed.
On the other hand, doctors also talk about patients who connect spiritually with certain natural treatments so much that they end up keeping the cancer at bay or even regressing. Oncologists believe that it is all due to the placebo effect. Some patients, even if they only do treatment with plain water, believe in that water so much that their body behaves as if they were taking a very effective medicine.
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