The First Encounter with Oncology: Patient Experience and Requisite Trust

Cancer is mysterious. Understanding its enimatic nature and societal implications is paramount to understanding how to establish trust with a new patient. The modern name for cancer comes from the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates who named the disease “karkinos,” meaning “crab.” His understanding of the disease was merely descriptive and rudimentary. He would observe lumps under the skin that formed projections resembling the legs of a crab (Papavramidou et al., Ann Surg Oncol 17:665–667, 2010). Even in antiquity, lumps like these were known to appear throughout the body and would ultimately lead to death. Over the centuries, scientific understanding of cancer advanced significantly. Now, cancerous phenomena and patterns of disease are ultimately linked to disruptions and permutations of the normal genetic code stored in our DNA.