psycho-oncology

The launch of World Psycho-Oncology Day signals growing momentum behind psychosocial care in cancer, but without structural change, millions of patients will continue to go without the support they need. With the announcement of World Psycho-Oncology Day (WPOD), to be…

In oncology, we are trained to deliver hope alongside difficult truths. We speak about survival rates, probabilities, and outcomes. In conflict settings, those terms lose stability. What does survival mean when hospitals are destroyed, treatments cannot reach patients, and people…

Too Much Hope is a False Hope K. still remembers the moment she heard the diagnosis. The room felt suddenly smaller, the air heavier, and time strangely suspended. “You wake up in a void, alone and scared,” she says. “But…

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”— Albert Camus People at the Centre of Care “United by Unique” is the World Cancer Day theme for 2025–2027. This year, the focus is on placing people at the…

Oncology is both one of the most inspiring and one of the most demanding fields in medicine. Unlike other specialties, the emotional and professional boundaries in oncology are often blurred. Many of us feel that our lives are devoted to…

A few days after being diagnosed with cancer, at only 32 years of age, Katarzyna Chmielewska-Wojciechowska met a friend who asked, in passing, how she was doing. She told him. His response was to sympathise and offer reassurance. He knew…

It isn’t over when treatment’s over. Even if, as far as the clinician is concerned, therapy has been successful and the cancer is effectively ‘cured’, cancer patients often experience a nagging – sometimes devastating – fear that their cancer will…

Two weeks after receiving a brain tumour diagnosis, Martin was copied into an email from one of his healthcare team telling his GP that Martin was “understandably devastated by his diagnosis”. The words came as a shock. “My healthcare team…