A very telling study in the New England
Journal of Medicine has concluded that people who are diagnosed with cancer have
a markedly increased risk of suicide and cardiovascular death immediately after
being given the diagnosis, a risk that stays up for several weeks.
Now, this study was done in Scandinavia so
perhaps there’s something unique to the people up there – or with their doctors
in how they communicate the diagnosis – that accounts for this rather worrisome
result, but I doubt it.
I think the diagnosis of cancer is so scary
that it can affect certain people (perhaps most of us) in a very adverse way,
often more adversely than we may have thought when we weren’t as concerned that
we might actually have cancer.
For me, the lesson from this is simply that
even when people insist to you that there doesn’t seem to be a good reason
against getting a particular screening test - PSA for prostate cancer,
mammogram for breast cancer, whole body scans, etc etc – it always pays to ask
yourself how you’d handle a result that indicated that – against the odds and
certainly beyond your expectations - you had cancer.
