Cancer on my mind is an article written by Dr. Albert Lim Kok Hooi, a consultant oncologist. He opens his article by saying:
As a doctor, I am interested in how the human mind works. As an oncologist, I am interested in the lure of alternative medicine. And so I have tried to understand why, in spite of all the scientific evidence at hand, there are many amongst us who do not want to undergo conventional cancer treatment – surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and targeted therapy – but instead risk being treated by unproven and potentially dangerous alternative therapies.
He goes on to say that this happens because sometimes science is not very well understood. He talks about confirmed bias, a phenomenon in cognitive science, the science of how the mind works. He describes it as a person that -- notices the hits and ignores the misses in support of his own beliefs. So, basically someone might have a strong bias against chemotherapy, for no other reason than what they have seen on television, without really knowing the true facts.
