Siddhartha Mukherjee Quotes

When are we going to say cancer is cured? I'm not sure when that will happen, if that will happen because cancer is a very slippery disease and it involves a vast number of cells in the body and those cells are continually mutating.

Although awareness of cancer's prevalence in the United States improves and medical advances in the field abound, pancreatic cancer has largely been absent from the list of major success stories.

Sidney Farber was a pathologist. He was called a doctor of the dead. He was a pathologist who sort of lived in the basement of the children's hospital in Boston, and he became very interested in childhood leukemia. And Farber began to inject this drug, aminopterin, into young kids, in order to see if he could get a remission.

After the pancreatic cancer, at first I went to N.I.H. every three months, then every four months, then every six months.

Cancer is a disease that is mysterious, headstrong and makes its own rules. And mine, to this date, is incurable.

In 2001, I was being treated for breast cancer, and I was pretty sure I was going to recover.

Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.

Every day we do get closer to a cure. Three out of four children who are diagnosed with cancer will survive the disease, but that is not good enough. The loss of one child to this disease is too much.

When I was diagnosed I didn't know how epidemic cancer was. You find out that everybody you know is touched by this disease.

If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.

Hodgkin's is serious and I don't want to be dismissive about it, but there are people who have gone through much worse and lost their lives to cancer.

You're never really cancer-free and I should have known that.

Having cancer is one thing; looking like you have cancer is another thing. It's a disease that already takes so much.

I'm happy to say that I am in remission. That R word is something critically important to cancer patients, especially in a disease like myeloma. But I never lose sight of the fact that there is another R word called relapse.

'Early stages' is when the cancer is completely contained within the prostate. If it is detected when the cancer is entirely in the gland, the chance for full recovery is at its highest.

Breast cancer isn't one disease - it's probably four or five different types, and without knowing what type a person has, you can't optimize treatment for them.

On Dec. 10, 2000, I learned I was free of cancer.

90 percent of children with leukemia can be cured, but 90 percent of the children with that disease in the world’s 25 poorest countries die from it.

I have talked to women who do yoga, who are vegan, who have never smoked and/or never drank a day in their life, but they have Stage IV breast cancer. So you do what you can to be as healthy as you can if you know you're high-risk because yes, all those things can factor into that. But sometimes it's just a fluke.

I have acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive type of cancer. The typical prognosis is 3-6 months to live, but I would like to stress that is for a patient who is not receiving treatment.

Everyone who survives cancer knows the victory against it may only be temporary. You know eventually that you might have to fight all over again. Almost 15 years after my mum's first bout of cancer, a second bout occurred. This time she needed an operation.

In Sept of 2013 I was diagnosed as having an aggressive form of stage 2 endometrial cancer. I underwent a rigorous treatment program that included a radical hysterectomy followed with chemo and radiation therapy.

[Gilda Radner] died in '89, and I got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2000. I've just passed the five-year mark and I'm now what you call - well, it's called complete remission, but I'm cured. I'm fine.

The question was, which would the chemo kill first: the cancer or me?

....chemotherapy's success record is dismal. It can achieve remissions in about 7% of all human cancers; for an additional 15% of cases, survival can be "prolonged" beyond the point at which death would be expected without treatment. This type of survival is not the same as a cure or even restored quality of life.