A brighter future may be right around the corner, because medicine is on the cusp of an incredible breakthrough that could revolutionize the practice of oncology: Doctors are closer than ever to discovering an easy way to say that a patient has cancer.
Fuck yeah! A discovery like this would change so many doctors’ lives for the better.
Every doctor dreads having to inform a patient that they have cancer, and the broken state of American healthcare only makes delivering news like that tougher. But thankfully, a team of researchers says they’re mere months away from finding a cutting-edge technique that will make telling someone their entire world is about to be shattered by cancer as simple and painless as telling them the day of the week.
“Over the years, I told so many patients, ‘There’s no easy way to say this, but you have cancer,’ that I finally had to ask myself: what if there WAS an easy way to say this?” said Dr. Sarah Ballentine, the oncologist spearheading this incredible research. “We’re seeing very promising results from having doctors roll a ball that says ‘YOU’ toward a ball that says ‘CANCER’ while nodding vigorously, and stage-whispering ‘You haff cahn-suh’ in a Schwarzenegger voice also shows incredible potential. If our work pays off, a doctor could tell as many as 500 patients that their lives are about to be devastated by a painful, costly disease in a single afternoon, and all without ever breaking a sweat. Even the grimmest prognoses will feel totally routine; explaining that someone only has months to live will become about as stressful for a doctor as taking their temperature. And best of all, our tests indicate that whatever technique we find will be equally effective when informing patients’ loved ones too, so having a weeping spouse or parent in the room will be a total non-issue no matter how hard they wail at the prospect of losing the most important person in the world to them.”
Take that, cancer! Your days of being difficult to tell someone they have are OVER!
With cancer cases on the rise, this breakthrough couldn’t be coming at a better time. Doctors are going to be giving out a lot of bad news in the coming years, so having a simple, worry-free way of completely upending patients’ lives in the space of a few short words is nothing less than an absolute godsend, especially in a country where that news is just as dire for people’s finances as it is for their actual bodies!
Wow, this discovery can’t come soon enough. Kudos to these doctors for refusing to accept the conventional wisdom that dropping a medical bombshell on someone has to be hard to do!
