Monday, July 1, 2013

This annoys me

This really annoys me to no end. I get all sosrts of emails about cancer, people with cancer, research on cancer, and 'exciting' news about cancer fundraisers and other things.

Recently in these emails, there have been
  • cancer sufferers
  • cancer victims
  • cancer survivors.

Since when with people with cancer become sufferers and victims? I detest the word survivor as well but sufferers and victims? Really?

These were included in the titles of actual news articles. The reporters need a bit of sensitivity training I think.

2 comments:

Chris said...

This is an interesting thought, Caroline. I'd love to hear more from you about how others should describe cancer patients.

Teresa Saum said...

I worked with students with disabilities for many years. We tried to use people first language. Instead of "he is autistic" we said "Carl is a child with autism". Maybe instead of cancer survivor, they could say women with cancer or men with cancer. Cancer doesn't need to be the first defining word.

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