Toward Personalized Informed Consent in Cancer Care

Toward Personalized Informed Consent in Cancer Care
Editorial
Anne Lanceley
Medical Anthropology, 18 January 2022
Excerpt
…As the articles in this volume show, people with cancer may experience profound emotional distress, bewilderment, and loss and are often challenged to engage in life while living with symptomatic disease and closeness to death. This circumstance may dramatically alter support needs and personal relationships, threaten psychological well-being, and present challenges for patients and families to say and navigate a complex health care system. The papers present different facets of the profound uncertainty and unpredictability that characterizes twenty-first-century cancer care for patients and clinicians. To me the articles reflect patients’ and health care professionals’ struggle with the risk calculus involved in consenting to treatments where outcomes are unproven, a struggle that has recently been embellished by the uncertainty of COVID-19…