A troubling dose of reality on TV
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Cancer, sad to say, is about biology. It’s not about strong will or positive attitude. People who eat well, don’t smoke, exercise and think happy thoughts get cancer. “Sometimes you can play by all the rules and just have bad biological luck,” says Linda Garmon, producer of a 90-minute PBS documentary “The Truth About Cancer.” The show airs Wednesday, April 16, at 9 p.m. EDT and PDT. It’s followed by a 30-minute panel discussion moderated by journalist Linda Ellerbee, a breast cancer survivor. The panelists are all physicians—and all cancer survivors themselves.
The documentary tackles the tough question: Why does anyone still die of cancer? While the news media regularly report on the potential of stem cell research, targeted drug therapies and potential breakthroughs, the grim truth is that fewer than one out of 10 patients will survive five years once cancer has spread to other parts of the body.
In the decades-old war on cancer, there are still some devastating forms of the disease (ovarian, pancreatic) with distressingly low survival rates, treatments that have not significantly changed in decades, and no preventive screening tests to find them before they spread.
The documentary is an important view of the reality of a cancer diagnosis but could be a difficult show to watch for patients or families in the midst of finding out for themselves that the war on cancer is far from won. Garmon documents her own husband’s diagnosis with lung cancer, his decline and, finally, his death. A patient in the documentary, Jamie Kleiman, 38, has pancreatic cancer that has spread to other organs. She has a difficult time convincing her father that there’s no doctor anywhere who holds the secret of her cure. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone hiding the secret magic bean,’ she says. But her father holds the very American attitude that you can control your destiny, and if you fight hard enough, you can beat cancer. That’s what Lance Armstrong did, after all.
But Kleiman has discovered the cruel difference between Armstrong’s successful testicular cancer treatment and her own pancreatic cancer, unresponsive to chemotherapy. ‘He had the most sensitive cancer to chemotherapy,’ she says. ‘It had nothing to do with the fact that he was an athlete.’
Cancer is not one disease. It takes hundreds of forms and once it spreads the war on cancer doesn’t go well.
-Susan Brink