A thyroid cancer diagnosis has a strange reputation: It’s cancer, but with a near 100 percent survival rate when caught in the early stages, it’s one of the “good” cancers, as many doctors and even other survivors will tell you.
But Alan Ho, M.D., Ph.D., thinks that categorization is a common misunderstanding of people who have never had thyroid cancer nor treated it. Ho is a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who specializes in malignancies like thyroid cancer. In a phone call, he told HuffPost that focusing on the cancer’s “excellent” survival rate eclipses the hardships patients go through in their treatment and lifelong maintenance of the disease.
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“A more balanced view would be to say, ‘Yes, there are certainly many other malignancies that have much worse outcomes in terms of survival,'” said Ho. “But all of these cancers have associated with them their own costs with regards to the treatments.”
“We don’t see cancer as a competition from disease to disease,” Bloom agreed. “The only competition we would see is against the disease — all of us as survivors are trying to live.”
