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Comment by dumpsterdiver | Hacker News Reader

> Calling a person's cancer diagnosis a "war" or a "battle" and saying they had "lost their battle" or "lost their fight" when they died, were other unpopular descriptions, according to the poll carried out by YouGov.

I am responding to the weakly linked poll, which I didn't read because there wasn't actually a link provided (that's why it is weak). YouGov is not a complete URL. Did you mean YouGov.io? Or perhaps YouGov.porn? Would we have better luck with YouGov.com, or will that lead us to a similarly questionable site?

Response: Um, okay. I'll be sure to not to mention such words when I refer to my girlfriend who is "having so much fun" with uterus cancer.

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> I'll be sure to not to mention such words when I refer to my girlfriend who is "having so much fun" with uterus cancer.

The issue is around bellicose metaphors in oncology. While some people respond to that language, many do not. In particular, in some studies it increases feelings of guilt regarding the transition from active to palliative care in situations where the malignancy is not responding to active treatment or where the patient doesn’t want to accept the adverse effects of treatment, as in “Oh, you’re giving up?”

But surely there are choices of language that are neither war-like nor cynical.

Across the board, we should "retire" the war-esque (i.e., violence normalizing) language. There's got to be better ways to communicate such things without promoting the species' worst habit.

If the modern western world needs more of something, it's definitely euphemism

The use of "lost the war with cancer" here is also a bit of a euphemism for "died from cancer".

To be fair, going from "lost his battle with cancer" to something else is at worst breaking even in terms of the western world's euphemism count.

True. But the war-based ones are far too normalized. What's next, The War on Violence? Or how about The War on War?

Words create worlds.

> The issue is around bellicose metaphors in oncology.

Translation: You seem to be claiming that "the issue" is about hostile rhetoric regarding the study and treatment of tumors.

> While some people respond to that language, many do not.

I'm not understanding what you are trying to say here. Do we not all respond to hostile rhetoric in unique ways? When you say that someone "does not respond", surely you mean something else?

> In particular, in some studies it increases feelings of guilt regarding the transition from active to palliative care in situations where the malignancy is not responding to active treatment or where the patient doesn’t want to accept the adverse effects of treatment, as in “Oh, you’re giving up?”

When you say that "in some studies it increases feelings of guilt", what is the "it" that you are referring to exactly?

>I'm not understanding what you are trying to say here. Do we not all respond to hostile rhetoric in unique ways? When you say that someone "does not respond", surely you mean something else?

"to respond" in the clinical world and what she or he is referring to here means having a positive reaction to treatment: https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-term...

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