The Director's Notes for October 16, 2009 - National Cancer Institute

"..Too often, those diagnosed with cancer hear, "The patient failed therapy," when the truth is that the therapy failed the patient.

The phrase was the subject of a 2009 commentary in The Oncologist by my colleagues Dr. Edward Benz, Jr., Director of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and Dr. Susan Bates from NCI's Center for Cancer Research. My hope is that in the future we will no longer need to use the word failure when it comes to treatments for cancer patients...."