Elizabeth Comen originally set out to write a book about the wellness industry, but ended up writing a different book altogether.
The book she wrote, “All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women’s Bodies and Why It Matters Today,” tells the stories of the countless women throughout history who were dismissed, forgotten, controlled, sexualized, shamed, or brutalized by the medical system.
Is it possible that these horrific practices and beliefs still harm women in the modern healthcare system?
“In the process of caring for thousands of women and being a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, and then add to that the experience of all of the patient stories shared with me, all this coalesced into an unwavering passion that I felt I could not neglect to really try to unpack,” Comen, a breast oncologist, said to The Cancer Letter. “What is this legacy that we’ve inherited, both as patients, but as physicians, as it relates to the experience of illness for women in our country and then, obviously, in my own practice? I felt absolutely compelled to do it.”
Comen, who spent 15 years at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, first as a fellow then as an attending, is now an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center.
Hair-raising stories abound in this book. There is the tale of the 1907 kidnapping and imprisonment of “Typhoid Mary” Mallon, for being a carrier of typhoid. And there is the story of Timmie Jean Lindsey, who, in 1962, was talked into becoming the first human to receive breast augmentation surgery utilizing encased silicone. Lindsey wanted a tattoo removed from her breast, and doctors promised to give her tattoo removal plus cosmetic surgery on her ears if she agreed to undergo augmentation as well, Comen writes.
There is also the story of Henry A. Cotton, a surgeon, who in the early 20th century made an illustrious career of treating mental illness by removing the teeth, tonsils, gallbladders, stomachs, spleens, cervixes, colons, and ovaries of his patients.
Stories of women whose symptoms are overlooked or dismissed until it’s too late emerge as an organizing principle of this book.
Writes Comen:
The first time Sierra tells a doctor she can’t breathe, it’s at the urgent care center near her daughter’s preschool. She’s walked here straight from drop-off, and while it’s a beautiful spring day and the distance is only a few blocks, she’s already winded. She’s always winded, she says, and it’s getting worse. She used to run for exercise, even trained for a half marathon; now she has to stop, bent double and gasping for air, before she’s even gone a mile. At home, her children run circles around her. She can’t keep up.
The doctor gestures toward the window, and the budding trees beyond it.
“Allergies,” he says. “I’m struggling with them myself.”
He sends her home with an antihistamine.
The second time comes weeks later. Same clinic, different doctor. Again, she lists her symptoms—shortness of breath, decreased stamina, and now a steady ache in her shoulder that gets worse whenever she coughs. The doctor squeezes her shoulder and diagnoses her with a strained muscle. He points to her chart, the notes from her last visit.
“You have seasonal allergies, yes?” he says. “Try not to cough so hard.”
The third time, the doctor is the same one who diagnosed her with allergies. It’s been months now, and Sierra’s cough is worse. She hasn’t exercised in ages, and can barely walk a block or lift up her daughter without gasping for air. She’s lost fifteen pounds anyway. The doctor frowns and says it looks like acid reflux. He sends her home with a prescription antacid. He says she’ll be better soon.
The fourth time, Sierra doesn’t go to that clinic. It’s winter now, the blooms on the trees long since fallen, the antacid she was given six months ago long since finished. If it helped at all, it was only for a moment; now, a single breath of cold air causes her to cough uncontrollably. When she drives to the emergency room, it’s partly because it’s easier, but also partly because she wants to see a doctor she hasn’t seen before. One who won’t wave her away, telling her its allergies, or muscle strain, or heartburn, when all she wants—all she’s ever wanted—was for them to actually look at her lungs.
The X-ray takes just a few minutes.
The doctor’s face is grim.
“I’m afraid it’s not good news,” he says. “It’s a shame you didn’t seek care sooner.”
It was lung cancer. By the time Comen met Sierra as a first-year fellow at MSK, the disease had metastasized throughout her body. Sierra died within a year.
“Respiratory medicine is plagued by the same tendency as other fields to write off a woman’s symptoms as anxiety without searching more deeply for an organic cause,” Comen writes.
Many diseases doctors like to describe as “silent killers” aren’t, and the catch phrase is a dangerous misnomer.
Writes Comen:
Most women with early-stage ovarian cancer experience symptoms for which they often seek medical help. In 2022, gynecologic oncologist Barbara Goff surveyed 1,700 ovarian cancer patients and founds that misdiagnosis was rampant: “15% had their symptoms attributed to irritable bowel disease, 12% to stress, 9% to gastritis, 6% to constipation, 6% to depression and 4% to some other cause. Thirty percent were given treatment for a different condition. And 13% were told there was nothing wrong.”
The problem is not that ovarian cancer is silent; it’s that we’re not listening.
Physicians are accustomed to having answers, Comen said. Bringing about change will require courage.
“I think it takes us having the bravery to take a step back and say, ‘What are the things we think we know?’” Comen said to The Cancer Letter. “Take a step back—from as early as preclinical studies, to clinically meaningful treatments and drug development, ask, ‘How can we really listen to what women are experiencing so that we can better address their needs?’”
Being a physician, a woman, and a patient can mean having to undo a tangle of shame and dismissal, Comen said.
Her example: six weeks following a back surgery, she developed a severe headache that got better when she was lying flat.
“As I explain more fully in my book, it was very classic for a cerebrospinal fluid leak, but in the course of trying to get help, I felt woefully shamed in all of it,” Comen said. “I didn’t trust my own gut, even when I had the medical knowledge. I apologized for the pain that I was in at the time I sought care, having been told I was “crazy” for thinking I could have a dural tear over a month after surgery. A delay in diagnosis meant ongoing unnecessary suffering until I was readmitted to the hospital for an extended period of time.”
Anyone can fall into that trap, Comen said.
“I had every resource available to me, and yet I still apologized. I still felt shame. I still minimized my pain and neglected my own health,” Comen said. “So, what does the average woman do, who doesn’t have resources, who doesn’t have any of the agency that I had, and who didn’t just write a book about advocating for your own health?
“So, it’s at once kind of horribly depressing, but I share it to say that I have a lot of empathy for what people can go through, and it’s also to say that I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you’re Albert Einstein, if you are in extreme pain or anxious from a diagnosis, even if you’re the most brilliant physician or researcher in the world, you can’t advocate for yourself from a place of weakness. We can hope that those who are providing care for us will hear us and see us and validate us and advocate for us. But sometimes an imperfect healthcare system can’t do that.”
The process of writing “All in Her Head” has given a new wave of inspiration to Comen’s work as an oncologist.
“For me, writing this book, researching this book, really reinvigorated my passion for medicine and my passion for how I think we should be caring for patients,” Comen said.
Her vision for caring for patients? Valuing traditionally feminine qualities in the clinic, as much as the traditionally masculine qualities that are currently exalted, she said in a conversation with The Cancer Letter.
Said Comen:
We’ve all, as providers or as patients, we’ve all read the studies that women listen better, that female patients have better outcomes when they’re operated on by a woman. But that does not mean that men can’t do that, too. We all know that there are incredible male providers.
What is inherent to the system that we’ve built is that we have not valued the same qualities in men vs. women, regardless of their sex.
We should not just expect women to uniformly be the “mom consult,” (as I heard from countless female physicians regardless of speciality), i.e. that women inherently listen better and have more empathy. Anyone can be empathic and a good listener. We should be encouraging and nurturing those qualities in medical students from the very beginning and at the very top of leadership.
It shouldn’t just be that fields that have continuity of care—fields that are perhaps paid less, but require longer time with patients—are dominated by women, while you have these other subspecialties that are dominated by men.
I think there needs to be a diversity of spirit and approach in all specialties. It doesn’t matter what your sex someone is—if we’re not valuing the different ways to provide care, then we’re not fully delivering holistic care.
Comen spoke with Jacquelyn Cobb, reporter with The Cancer Letter.
Jacquelyn Cobb: Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me today.
Your book astounded me, it enraged me, it held me captive the whole time. The historical and modern injustices against women are flabbergasting, even for someone who has some prior knowledge and has lived experience as a woman. How was it for you, researching this, writing this?
Elizabeth Comen: Well, I’ve definitely been asked that question a lot of times, and my thoughts on it have evolved.
The really transparent, honest answer is that I majored in the history of science in college, but I never would have imagined writing what people are describing as feminist literature. To me, for so long, women’s health was reduced to gynecology.
And even though I was passionate about cancer and breast cancer, I didn’t imagine that I would become this women’s health advocate.
In the process of caring for thousands of women and being a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, and then add to that the experience of all of the patient stories shared with me that I heard, all this coalesced into an unwavering passion that I felt I could not neglect to really try to unpack.
What is this legacy that we’ve inherited, both as patients, but as physicians, as it relates to the experience of illness for women in our country and then, obviously, in my own practice? I felt just absolutely compelled to do it.
In that, I have stepped into this genre and role that I never imagined I probably would have.
Well, I’m so glad you did.
How was this book born? Is there a genesis moment that happened? When did you know you were going to write a book about this topic, rather than just pursue it as a passion?
EC: Originally, I thought I was going to write a book on the naturalistic fallacy that so many women fall into—this trap of wellness that is really unwell.
And that’s what I originally thought I wanted to write about, and how that plays out into cancer treatment today. And where are we missing the mark, and how can we do better? And how can we take care of the whole person better?
And as I thought more and more about what it means to be a whole woman and a sick woman, beyond the cancer diagnosis, and where do we miss the mark? It was natural for me to want to include the history of medicine in this exploration.
Feeling that I was equipped to include the history was the hardest part. I felt very confident in the here-and-now, modern medicine, and that I could tackle that. But I definitely had imposter syndrome when it came to really believing that I could delve into the history of the entire body of work of women’s health.
And how could I make this manageable and bite-sizeable and relatable? Because the last thing I wanted to do was a death by PowerPoint equivalent of a book that was academic and completely inaccessible, that people would say they read because it was intellectual, but no one actually ever read it, and no one felt anything meaningful from reading it.
We all know those books. They do well in some circles. But that wasn’t what I wanted to write.
And for me, what really was the catalyst was several different moments. One was reading a book on the history of nymphomania and the story of Horatio Robinson Storer and what he said about nymphomania and women.
And I was just so horrified by this man who was such a stakeholder in the history of women’s health–and it motivated me to go back in time and explore who built the system of medicine as we know it today. Who were these personalities? And how did they impact, including the throughlines to today’s practice of medicine for women?
Secondly, I had a colleague, a very close young colleague, Dr. Tomas Lyons, who passed away suddenly in clinic a few years ago. He literally dropped dead in my arms, suddenly.
And one of the last conversations that we had was my secret wish to write this book, and the last thing he said to me was, “You got to write the damn book, Elizabeth.”
So, when he died, I was trying to find—we all try to find meaning in grief, and I really wanted to honor his legacy, his care of women, as it was extraordinary. Honoring his life and his remarkable commitment to caring for women was one of the deep motivations for me to write the book as well.
Thank you for sharing that. I’m so sorry for your loss.
EC: Thanks.
In terms of you not writing a death by PowerPoint book—all of the examples and the way they were written were so gripping.
There are multiple heart-wrenching examples of specific women who had diseases, and specifically cancers, like lung and ovarian—totally missed until it was too late because physicians wrote off the symptoms as anxiety or stress, or even as other diseases.
What can modern physicians do to avoid these pitfalls to avoid missing cancer specifically, but also other diseases in women? And what can oncologists do to avoid dismissing their patient’s symptoms?
EC: Well, there are so many things, and I know that a lot of the book’s examples are egregious and terrifying. But there’s a lot of also hopeful stories of people of both genders, both sexes really being remarkable.
Whether it was Michael Lockshan and his caring about his medical student’s wish to have children after she was diagnosed with lupus, and how that inspired him in his entire career, or whether it was Dr. Saadi Ghatan and his work with epilepsy patients, or Dr. Omri Ayalon at NYU, developing a prosthetic arm for a patient after really listening to what her needs were, which was not to have a robo-arm, a robotic looking arm, but an arm that looked like her real hand.
I think the biggest thing is thinking about what are the ways—and taking a step back to think about what are the ingested ways—that we have, whether we’re a man or a woman, drank the Kool-Aid of what it means to be a patient, particularly as a woman, and experience illness.
And there is a little bit of hubris that we need to have. This is something that Dr. Lockshin and I spoke a lot about, because he’s a rheumatologist, is that often, when we don’t know, and we’re used to being so smart and being able to study things and figure them out—whether we’re scientists or physicians—that when we don’t know something, often the default is to say, “Well, it must be because something is inherently wrong with the next person, as in it’s psychosomatic or all in their head, because I don’t know.”
And I think a big component of the path forward is to recognize what we don’t know, what we think we know, and acknowledge what we really don’t know. And to start a little bit more from the ground up of listening to those people who are afflicted, whether it’s cancer or other illnesses.
Think about how many syndromes are attributed to women, constellations of symptoms, not yet described as diseases with known pathology because we simply haven’t devoted the resources, time, and interest into investigating them. Or perhaps the diseases that we think are relatively sudden in presentation and without warning.
A good example would be ovarian cancer. Is ovarian cancer really a silent killer? When you talk to patients, they describe their symptoms far sooner, far earlier than, in many instances, they are acknowledged and worked up for. So, I think it takes us having the bravery to take a step back and say, “What are the things we think we know?”
Take a step back, from as early as preclinical studies to clinically meaningful treatments and drug development, ask, “How do we really listen to what women are experiencing so that we can better address their needs?”
Even in the case of lung cancer, for example. Lung cancer kills so many women, including a huge proportion of women who have never smoked. Is that correct?
EC: That’s a huge unmet need. The rise of lung cancer among non-smoking women.
In the absence of knowing for sure, what comes up is the stereotypes that everybody just leans on, if they don’t find that bravery you mentioned.
EC: Yeah. And that includes all of us, whether we’re newly practicing or have been practicing for decades.
Funding in medicine inevitably follows what the field and broader culture deems important. There are many examples of this in your book, but I thought a really salient one was that of ACL tears in women, and that even once the phenomenon of ACL tears being much more likely to occur in women than men, and in different ways, research is still focused on “non-modifiable risk factors” as opposed to “modifiable risk factors.”
This example really touched on the fact that there’s this underlying assumption that women’s bodies are inherently inferior to men’s, even in the modern age. Could you speak a little bit about this for people who haven’t read your book yet?
EC: Sure, if you look at the history of Western medicine, there has never really been a consistent message that women’s bodies are as powerful or as intelligent, and thus as capable, as men’s.
And throughout history, from anatomical depictions to drug delivery, there is a pervasive idea that women are, at best, a smaller version of a man, or other times an imperfect, inverted version of a man.
Historically, the 70 kg man reigned supreme as the model for disease presentation and exploration—when in fact, at every biological and metabolic level, we know that women are not small men.
When I tore my ACL at 14 years old, it really impacted my life. I was a dancer. I was an athlete. I saw a great surgeon at the time. We’re all products of the context of our times–so I relay this story with grace and respect for him.
He essentially said to me, “Well, let’s see how active you become for the rest of your life.” And I tried to continue dancing and playing sports without an ACL for four years thereafter.
And I am a crazy “worker-outer.” There isn’t a fitness trend that I haven’t tried. I still dance, I still play sports. I still work out, and ultimately, four years later, I ended up having another knee injury and needing the whole knee pretty much reconstructed.
I don’t think that would have been said to me if I were a 14-year-old male soccer player.
You do have a lot of sort of examples of hope and you know positivity in this in the book, but it is really easy to get sort of fired up and downtrodden about all this.
EC: There’s also this cultural component of, are women allowed to be angry?
I met with an oncologist, an older oncologist. And he said, “Wow, I can’t believe how nice you are, and friendly. I thought you were going to be a lot angrier.”
I think we should be allowed to be angry about the things that deserve the rage. Sometimes, that rage is powerful and constructive when unpacked and dissected in ways that are useful.
I’d love to dive into the topic of sex as a biological variable, and how NIH now mandates inclusion of women and minorities as participants in research involving human subjects. I’m also thinking about the basic science research in male mice, because female mice were considered too difficult to work with, and how that relates to immunotherapy in cancers.
EC: It wasn’t until 1993 that the NIH was required to include women in clinical trials, and some of this was based on the idea that women of childbearing age should be protected.
But the underlying message there is that we are vessels, that our mission is to reproduce. And there were a lot of consequences to not including women in clinical, NIH-funded trials, or many trials, for that matter, whether it be the study of cardiovascular drugs, whether it was the study of chemotherapies, all sorts of different types of medications were biased towards understanding them in men, and then assuming the same would apply to women.
And it wasn’t just medications. It’s also devices as well, and other interventions.
The other thing to note: It wasn’t until 2016 that researchers were required to state the sex of the mice used in laboratory studies. I actually wanted to title one of the chapters “Of Mice and Men.”
How many of these preclinical trials and studies were done on male-derived mice across the board? And certainly, when you look at chemotherapies or immunotherapies, women have different side effects, and can have different metabolic reactions to the medications that they’re receiving.
Do you think that that’s pretty much been ameliorated now?
EC: The National Institute of Health published a policy in 2016, requiring researchers to include male and female subjects and samples and experiments.
And a recent Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs policy on sex as a biological variable said that beginning with applications submitted to FY25 funding opportunities, the CDMRP expects researchers to study both males and females, unless there’s a strong justification from the scientific literature, preliminary data, or other relevant considerations for only studying one sex.
You briefly touched on the issue of trans health in this book. I appreciate that you did, because a lot of books about women’s health totally exclude trans women. But I’d love to give you the opportunity to expand on the topic, considering that trans women, in my understanding, have some of the worst health outcomes.
EC: I was just looking at an article in The New England Journal of Medicine: “A legacy of cruelty to sexual and gender minority groups.”
The reality is, I wrote this book as a history of women’s health, and as defined historically as women as XX. Historically, we didn’t have other nomenclature in medicine. This is all, of course, very recent.
But there is certainly history that needs to be explored and exposed along these lines with respect to sexual orientation and gender minorities.
That was really not the intention of my book per se, but I hope to acknowledge that as much as there’s a history of bias towards women, that extends to a spectrum of orientations, as well.
This history was really apparent when I was looking at the history of the study of endocrinology, and then discovery of estrogen and testosterone. The binary bias in that discovery (i.e. that estrogen is in women and testosterone in men) impacts medical research—such as the assumption that “effeminate” men were going to have more estrogen, or that you could “convert” effeminate men by giving them testosterone. And obviously, this is at best, preposterous, at worst, torturous and horrific.
So, the book touches upon this history, and certainly, I hope there is more done to illustrate the historical bias therein.
I’m definitely looking forward to reading that NEJM article.
I would love to touch on women’s complicity, both as patients and as physicians, in the ongoing pervasiveness of these issues. I thought that your example of your cerebrospinal fluid leakage was really powerful.
EC: I think the key for me in reading this history is that it’s very easy to look at it as black and white—to look at it as “The people who built this system were terrible. Their intentions were bad.”
And that includes women who may perpetuate some of these stereotypes.
But I think I really try to see this and approach it with a lot of grace and forgiveness, including for myself and for those of the past, because as angry as I am at so many of the things that I read about, it’s not going to serve me or our health system as much as the energy of constructive thought will, moving forward.
But the example that I use at the end of the book was not one that I anticipated or expected.
I had written the entire book. I’d had a minor back surgery, and six weeks after the surgery, I had a horrible—this is not part of the book—GI bug. My whole family was sick. I ended up working shortly before the holidays, and I probably should have called out sick, but I didn’t want to say that I was sick. I had already taken leave for when I had this back surgery.
But I was really quite sick, and I don’t know how or why, but I developed a dural tear in the area of the surgery, and I was leaking CSF.
And I was at a New Year’s Eve party, and very long story short, I noticed that when I lifted my head was when I had an excruciating headache. When I would lie back, I felt better. It was very classic for a CSF leak, but in the course of trying to share this diagnosis with both doctors that were not my doctor, but also doctors who were caring for me, I felt woefully shamed in all of it.
And I mean, that’s putting it nicely. I’ll leave it for the book to read for anyone who wants to read what happened.
But the point is that I didn’t trust my own gut, even when I had the medical knowledge. I apologized for the pain that I was in at the time I sought care. I was really quite ill, and could have had a catastrophic event from that.
And even in those moments—I had every resource available to me, and yet I still apologized. I still felt shame. I still minimized my pain and neglected my own health. So, what does the average woman do, who doesn’t have resources, who doesn’t have any of the agency that I had, and who didn’t just write a book about advocating for your own health.
So, it’s at once kind of horribly depressing, but I share it to say that I have a lot of empathy for what people can go through, and it’s also to say that I don’t care who you are. I don’t care if you’re Albert Einstein, if you are in extreme pain or anxious from a diagnosis, even if you’re the most brilliant physician or researcher in the world, you can’t advocate for yourself from a place of weakness.
And we can hope that those who are providing care for us will hear us and see us, and validate us, and advocate for us. But sometimes an imperfect healthcare system can’t do that.
And we all need someone to champion us, and be by our side, whether it’s a friend or a family member, to bring somebody to an appointment, or to an emergency room when things really go sideways, because we all need someone to advocate for us.
In the book, you mentioned that medicine has not been feminized with increased gender parity. I really appreciated that idea that you proposed, of elevating and giving greater respect to the traditionally feminine attributes in the field, such as treating patients as a comprehensive system, rather than a series of broken parts.
And you have some other examples in the book as well. To read just one quote, “What if we valued these skills as highly, and rewarded them accordingly, so that all doctors have a powerful incentive to engage with patients in this way?”
I’d love to give you a platform to speak a little bit more about this, for our readers.
EC: I’m really passionate about the idea that this book is not to say that there should be warring factions between men and women. We’ve all, as providers or as patients, we’ve all read the studies that women listen better, that female patients have better outcomes when they’re operated on by a woman.
But that doesn’t mean that men can’t do that, too. And I think that we all know that there are incredible male providers.
What is inherent to the system that we’ve built is that we have not valued the same qualities in men vs. women, regardless of their sex.
What is inherent to the system that we’ve built is that we have not valued the same qualities in men vs. women, regardless of their sex.
We should not just expect the women to uniformly be the “mom consult,” (as I heard from countless female physicians regardless of speciality), i.e. that women inherently listen better and to have more empathy.
Anyone can be empathic and a good listener. We should be encouraging that and nurturing those qualities in medical students from the very beginning and at the very top of leadership.
It shouldn’t just be that fields that have continuity of care—fields that are perhaps paid less, but require longer time with patients—are dominated by women, while you have these other subspecialties that are dominated by men.
I think there needs to be a diversity of spirit and approach in all both specialties. We should value the more ineffable, but also the characteristics in a physician that we value, and that includes both those who are primary caregivers, but also those in positions of leadership, because it doesn’t matter what your sex someone is—is if we’re not valuing the different ways to provide care, then we’re not fully delivering holistic care.
Even if you just look at NCI-designated cancer center directors, only 10 are women. How can we get more women into leadership positions, especially when leadership propensity is based on very masculine metrics of success?
EC: Well, you’re asking me the question, and you’re doing it in an important publication. So, hopefully, people will read it and be a little bit more open-minded.
But I think this really speaks to the point that when we have more variety and diversity in leadership, it will also change who’s at the table, and who’s listening to the problems that need to be addressed.
It goes back to all of these unmet needs. Whether it’s ovarian cancer as a silent killer. Whether it’s that 80% of autoimmune diseases are in women, and somehow we don’t know why. There’s so much for us to investigate.
If we have more people who are curious, as opposed to dismissive of what these broader questions can be and are, and are open-minded, I think we’ll move the needle towards more equitable care across the board.
How would you summarize your goals in writing the book?
EC: There are two different ways to look at this: both as a patient and then as a physician.
As a patient, the book is clearly not prescriptive. This is not a 12-step guide to your wellness; take a bath, make sure you have your checkup, sleep well, eat more protein. This is really about stories, stories from the past, stories from the present, and stories from that past-present continuum that plays out when you are not well.
And what I invite the reader to do in this book is to think about when you read these stories that seem so foreign, but yet they clearly trigger something in so many of us, is to say what are the stories that you’ve told yourself about your body as a result of history, as of as a result of culture, as a result of maybe ancestral heritage and what your family has told you about your body?
And to think, “How could I tell myself a different story about myself? What are the places where it is negatively impacting me?” and “How, in turn, when I go to my next doctor’s appointment, or I’m thinking about something with respect to my body, can I ask that question I always wanted to ask? Can I advocate for myself just a little bit differently?”
So, the book is not a pure answer, but an invitation to think differently about how you see your own body as a part of a broader society, but also your relationship with yourself.
It’s also an invitation to physicians to say, including myself, “How are you trained? How does that approach—how you enter a patient exam room, and maybe even how you negotiate for yourself about what you value in yourself as a physician, how together, if we continue thinking of and questioning these narratives that we’ve so, maybe unwittingly, ingested—how can we perhaps create a new future narrative that’s a little better?
Well, thank you so much. Did we miss anything?
EC: I think so many people go into oncology because we have a love of the science and a dream of better outcomes. But many of us are also drawn to the field for the uncomfortable conversations, for the willingness to sit with patients in incredibly hard moments, and to ask those existential questions, often very creatively, both of themselves and of their patients.
Out of that, I know there are probably many people who have a book in themselves that they might want to write. And for me, writing this book, researching this book, really reinvigorated my passion for medicine and my passion for how I think we should be caring for patients.
So, my other piece would be: If there’s anybody reading this who has a story in them, don’t be afraid to share it and go for it.
Thank you so much.
