Dear Mom,

Your experience with the doctors who told you, ten years ago, that if your cancer ever came back it would be “worse than the first time,” highlights a real problem with doctors’ training — they sometimes seem to lack the training that would have helped them to understand what they do not and cannot know. It is simply unknowable that cancer would, necessarily, come back worse the second time, in every patient. I would go so far as to say these doctors are violating the scientific method by purporting to have such certainty, not to mention committing egregious harm to patients who are unable to get such words out of their heads.

At best, the scientifically accurate statement would have begun with these words — “On average” — and would have ended with “but we can’t really know, and your situation could be completely different.”

We hear stories every day of doctors who have told someone they had two weeks, or six months, to live — and the person lives five, ten, twenty years. Why would someone, lacking both humility, in the awesome face of their science, and certainty, nevertheless lay hold to claims of certainty that cannot be supported?  Perhaps they think it’s simply their job to have something to say.

But it is deadly arrogance.

Given the power of the human mind to do its body well or ill, doctors may do more damage with insupportable assertions of certainty about unhappy outcomes than can be done by the disease in question itself.

I would urge you to realize something your doctors can’t, which is that they have simply rummaged around in a grab-bag of received opinion and averages and pulled out loose talk, which they then handed you, like feces in a bag, for you to hold onto.

Don’t take the bag. Doctors know neither the mind of God nor nature, and it is simply not possible to state anything with 100% certainty, as they too often do.

You are free to believe anything is possible. And anything is. Let’s believe that, together. As between two unknowable outcomes, we can choose the one that gives us the most happiness, the most hope, and therefore the strongest immune system — and the best chance for survival.

This post has been adapted from what was originally a comment to Inge’s post.

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