Stefan Vidakovic, MD · September 2026
As I embarked on a journey in medicine, I noticed that even among medical professionals there is a certain pause when people talk about cancer and cancer patients. People and even doctors restrain themselves from talking about it. They look away when a patient with a cancer diagnosis comes to them. I always wondered why. It is a patient and a person like any other. It shouldn’t be that different from heart failure or rheumatoid arthritis, both of which are serious and sometimes deadly conditions. Yet, it was. Thinking about it, I presumed that people avoid this topic because it is so closely connected to thoughts about death. Seldom do people think about death consciously. It is a topic we face when we have to, when there is no other way out. However, we all die, and most of us get sick. It makes sense to me to prepare yourself for the moment that inevitably comes. But this perspective is far from dominant. Death and disease were and are taboo. We want to evade them for as long as possible because, we think, they are certainly coming and there is nothing we can do to change it. But is it so?
Doctors encounter death and disease far more often than regular people, and they should be familiar with this important milestone in the life of every person. They should be more prepared, more accepting. Nevertheless, they too avoid cancer. At least most of them. That is why my decision to become a cancer specialist came as a surprise to my family, friends, and colleagues. The most honest among them even said: “Is there really nothing else that you could do?”
As I thought more about this unusual aversion of the medical community toward oncology, I realized why doctors behave as they do. It is not death that scares doctors; it is failure or being deemed unsuccessful in the treatment of a patient. Furthermore, the complexity of cancer and some of its therapies doesn’t help in bringing doctors closer to an understanding of the disease and its patients. This fear of the unknown is a powerful force that makes us want to escape a particular environment or group. Perhaps we should, as some of the pioneers in our discipline did, try to see the unknown as a challenge and at least try to understand it. What we, as medical professionals, can do with certainty is approach cancer patients with more compassion and understanding. If we cannot help them as doctors, we can help them as human beings. They don’t need our condolences; they ask for our support.
For me, it was from the first encounter a field with plentiful opportunities and professional challenges. I embarked on a journey called cancer medicine at a particular moment. It is a moment when we witness many revolutionary achievements in cancer treatment. It is not by chance that this is so, but rather the result of decades of hard work in basic science research. We get to reap the benefits of those groundbreaking studies in our understanding of cell and cancer biology.
For decades, it seemed that oncology stood still in an era that started with Sidney Farber and his successors. Everything that we could offer as a means against tumors was “blunt force”. Unspecific therapies (chemotherapy and radiotherapy) that kill normal cells along with tumor cells. Those therapies brought a lot of benefits to thousands of patients, and they were by all means a huge success in many cases (therapy of testicular cancer and Hodgkin lymphoma, to name a few). But this approach was of moderate success in most solid tumors, especially if they had already spread (metastasized). It also widened the stigmatization of cancer patients. The usual side effects of chemotherapy, such as hair loss, became synonymous with the disease itself. The patients were even more estranged from society.
But with new technologies and targeted therapies, we have reduced the side effects while simultaneously increasing effectiveness. We are less aggressive and more directed. And the results are spectacular, to say the least. Conventional therapies still remain powerful weapons in our arsenal, but they are progressively being replaced with smart drugs. So doctors are not powerless anymore, and we have a lot to offer our patients.
Let’s be honest, cancer still is our prime enemy. It still beats us many times, but its battlefield is getting smaller by the day. A lot of cancers are today, if not curable, then turned into chronic diseases such as asthma and diabetes. Cancer patients are able, if they want to fight this fearsome disease, and they are not defenseless victims waiting to die.
So I fight against this societal injustice toward my patients. They deserve our full support, and we should start treating them as members of our community and not isolate them as departing outcasts who don’t belong to our world anymore.