does continuing to “fight” actually affect the outcome of a cancer diagnosis?

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When someone is diagnosed with cancer, we often see comments like “keep fighting, you’ve got this!”. Is there any scientific basis behind this actually having an effect on the outcome / survival and remission rates? What exactly are they doing when they’re “fighting” that helps to beat the cancer?

In: Biology

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The human body can do some pretty surprising things, and keeping one’s motivation up is at least good for morale. It’s not out of the question that refusing to give up can indeed help fight off cancer. The flip side to this is that people who “give up” do indeed have higher mortality rates, cancer or no.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Using metaphors similar to fighting or war has been found to be damaging to patients. While getting through treatment with a positive mentality helps, cancer gives no fucks.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/lets-stop-talking-about-battling-cancer/

Anonymous 0 Comments

Not exactly right to the question, but there is a recognized condition known as “psychogenic death” in which someone simply gives up due to death seeming inevitable. This causes them to basically withdraw into themselves, and death comes as a result. This is often why people who have a spouse pass also pass away relatively quickly. So in a way, continuing to fight seems like it can in fact lead to a different outcome in some cases.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Kind of a meta question with a whole lot of variables to consider…

Let’s take an example of a cancer with a high mortality rate, such as glioblastoma or pancreatic cancer. Primary GBM remains incurable, median survival without treatment is 3 months from diagnosis, with treatment is 15 months. Five year survival rate is 5%. Treatment consists of surgical resection, radiation, and chemo, and all the side effects that go along with it. So objectively, those who choose treatment (“fight”) get a median difference of 12 months over those who don’t. For pancreatic cancer, five year survival rate of those diagnosed who are amenable to surgery is 7%, for those unnameable it is 10%. (Newer treatments may increase these numbers in the near future.)

However, on the flip side, take that same pancreatic cancer patient nearing the end of his/her life, and ask them if they’d prefer hospice care, focused on comfort and quality of life over curative goals and quantity (moments over minutes) and studies show that such a patient will live on average 29 days longer in hospice over those that choose to “fight” on.

The treatment for an aggressive cancer can be incredibly damaging to the body, and the side effects often worse than the cancer itself. I’ve seen so many patients choose to fight when the fight was already lost, basically clutching on to this nebulous hope that by “not giving up” they’d find a way back to living their life as it was before they ever knew about cancer in the first place. And I’ve also seen patients so afraid of living the rest of their life in a battle against this disease that they give up the battle early, when there was still ground to be won. To this day, I’ve never been able to make a general rule about when it’s appropriate for someone to keep fighting, and when it’s time to throw in the towel. It’s always case by case.

But I do know that we all make choices throughout life, whether to go to college and where, whether to get married and to whom, where we live, and work, and play, and whether or not to have or adopt kids, etc. But with cancer, the choice between fighting and not may be one of the last choices, and it’s theirs to make. And at the end when so many choices are being taken away from you, maybe that choice is the most empowering thing you have. Choosing not to fight is just as brave as choosing to, often more so. So who knows, some live longer by fighting, and others live longer by not.

The people and families that switch their mindset from fighting for time to fighting for quality at the most appropriate moment, in my experience have the better outcomes, subjectively. In a way though, you could say that both of these categories of people are still fighters nonetheless.

Hope that helps…

Edit: thanks for the gold, my first one!

Anonymous 0 Comments

No, the idea that people can fight cancer is pure fucking selfishness, it is so completely wrong it makes me sick to my stomach. Regardless of how hard people try, sometimes cancer doesnt give a fuck and it kills you anyways, and then when someone “loses the fight” it is seen as THEIR OWN FAULT, which is absolutely horrible for self esteem and severely stresses people out which makes it more likely that cancer will kill you.

Stress is one of the biggest factors in regards to cancer. If you are stressed out, your immune system will shut down because your body is preparing to run or actually fight for your life. Your immune system is responsible for destroying cancer cells but it isnt perfect, and regardless of how hard you try, sometimes the immune system and chemo just isnt enough.

By forcing this idea onto people that its their fault if they are dying, and that they just need to try harder, only makes people more stressed out. In turn this lowers the immune system and you are even less likely to survive.

The notion of “fighting cancer” is due to the pure selfishness of everyone around the individual.

Because they want to believe they are doing something kind, because they dont want the person to leave them, because they want to believe that there is hope, because they are too selfish to simply be there with the person even if it is hopeless. People care more about themselves and how a person with cancer affects them, they want to believe they are helping so that they can feel good about themself but it only makes things worse because they dont even consider what the person with cancer is going through and how those words might affect them in a bad way, especially when you are already struggling to live.

Putting these kinds of expectations on people is just cruel, and the best way to help, is just to try and get rid of as much stress as possible so that the body can do what it is designed to do.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Fighting is a real thing but not for any mystical mind over matter reason.

Being seriously ill is hard work. Basic things, like eating, hygiene, exercise, taking meds, and reporting issues to your doctor are hard when you are in pain, weak, fatigued, delirious, or depressed. Life-saving treatments, like surgery and chemo, can get delayed by a minor infection or a bad lab results, things that better self care would have prevented, and people sometimes die waiting for something minor to clear up.

It is not unusual for patients to become discouraged and not pursue their treatment and care as aggressively as they might. Given a choice between an aggressive treatment and an easier, but less effective one, they go with easy. Or sometimes they just give up and stop trying. If a patient has to be nagged into taking care of themselves, they are not fighting.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Want to put my two cents in. My mother was diagnosed Stage 4 lung with 6 months left in 2016. Her immediate response:”Fuck it, I’m going to fight it.”

My Stepfather diagnosed the same in 2017. He put his affairs in order to make sure things would be well after his passing.

Both did exact same Chemo and treatments.

Stepfather passed away three months later, 2017.

Mother chose not to ring the bell, but has been in full remission since 2018.

Sensitive subject, so trying to post objectively. Ask me any questions.

Anonymous 0 Comments

My father and one of my brothers are medical doctors, and in despite of believing only in facts, they have told me that positive actitudes can make a huge difference in getting better, living longer or in the quality of life when someone has cancer.
If the cancer is really an agresive one the will die anyway but maybe the person will live longer.
That’s what they told me, I’m not a doctor.

Anonymous 0 Comments

As a cancer surviver I don’t understand where this ‘fighting cancer’ is coming from. That oncologists might see it as a battle is understandable, but that it has shifted to the patients themselves is strange. Maybe someone started it as a way of giving people hope that they are not powerless when diagnosed, but as some others here have said, it has a nasty backlash that the patient is made partly responsible for when things don’t turn out well.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are trends in cancer immunotherapy treatments of patients having greater survival rates if they have tried multiple immunotherapy types instead of just one. On the other hand, immunotherapy is usually very, very expensive. Even so, I hope the costs will go down steadily soon because I do think it will be best shot we have for now.