Alleviating the Breast Cancer Experience: A Plea for Psycho-Oncology

[摘要] In public perception, breast cancer seems to increasingly have become a manageable disease – to the point that breast cancer patients are sometimes faced with minimization of their condition, expressed in remarks like, ‘Don't be upset – it's only breast cancer.’ Indeed, prospects have considerably brightened for breast cancer patients. Nowadays, the vast majority of them will never develop metastatic disease, and even for those who do there is often some reasonable hope for many more years of life. Nevertheless, in a recently published large-scale investigation, mental disorders were found to be present in 42% of breast cancer patients. No other group of cancer patients showed an equally high rate of psychological morbidity [1]. Why do breast cancer patients experience exceptionally high levels of distress, despite a generally favorable prognosis?

[学科分类] 泌尿医学