"No patient left behind": an alternative to "the War on Cancer" metaphor.

ABSTRACT

The War on Cancer began with President Nixon's National Cancer Act of 1971. Treatment-related 'collateral damage' to healthy cells and tissues that reduces quality of life is an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the overriding imperative to "win the war." In the face of a quality of life decrement, patients are encouraged with militaristic turns-of-phrases to "soldier on," "fight it," and "never say die." Rather than this dysfunctional imagery, which relegates patients to the status of mere cogs in the ever-grinding wheel of the clinical war machine and encourages the practice of disease-centered medicine, we propose an alternate analogy/organizing principle borrowed from the realm of education No patient left behind.