Cancer Rebels: Why We Need A New Lens To View The Beast

As a journalist, an exciting (and frustrating) experience is to find a publication running a story that you thought should have been run yesterday. Ideally, you would have wanted it with your byline, but for many reasons, when that does not happen, the next best thing is to find the story being published and given the treatment that is to your liking.

This year's Newsweek special health issue on Cancer Rebels is one such story. While cancer research increasingly is coming to terms with its years of blind groping and is buying genetic glasses to examine mutation, cancer survivors too are learning to bend rules, change conventions and find new ways to take on the beast. This is their tale of finding vitality in unknown places.

One of the stories is about an organisation called Stupid Cancer, which is providing young people with resources to tackle cancer. Like its founder says, “Young people need some place other than a 'roundtable with old people' to sort through the mess that cancer brings. Like a local bar.”

Another is about Tamika Felder, a cancer survivor herself and now an "intimacy advocate" who helps survivors find their way back to sex and pleasure. A doctor-turned-advocate who is passionate about a wholesome life after cancer (and that includes having as normal a sexual life as possible), she narrates her experiences of counselling women whose vaginal canals were meshed together and what could be done to help them have a good quality sexual life. The third story is about how parents are questioning law and offering their sick toddlers medical marijuana.

If there is a single theme running through these absorbing stories, it is this: cancer needs an overhaul of thinking – in how we understand its evolution, its treatment and diagnosis, and how we deal with survivors.

Indeed, the series also has a reassuring article on scientists who are looking to defy current evaluations of how the disease evolved. They are rebels too.