Smile! You've got cancer | Barbara Ehrenreich | Society | The Guardian

Smile! You've got cancer | Barbara Ehrenreich | Society | The Guardian:

'via Blog this'Cancer is not a problem or an illness – it's a gift. Or so Barbara Ehrenreich was told repeatedly after her diagnosis. But the positive thinkers are wrong, she says: sugar-coating illnesses can exact a dreadful cost 


"How could I have breast cancer? I had no known risk factors, there was no breast cancer in the family, I'd had my babies relatively young and nursed them both. I ate right, drank sparingly and worked out. When the gynaecologist suggested a follow-up mammogram four months later, I agreed only to placate her."
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I, at least, was saved from this additional burden by my persistent anger – which would have been even stronger if I had suspected, as I do now, that my cancer was iatrogenic, that is, caused by the medical profession. When I was diagnosed, I had been taking hormone replacement therapyfor almost eight years, prescribed by doctors who avowed it would prevent heart disease, dementia, and bone loss. Further studies revealed in 2002 that HRT increases the risk of breast cancer, and, as the number of women taking it dropped sharply in the wake of this news, so did the incidence of breast cancer. So bad science may have produced the cancer in the first place, just as the bad science of positive thinking plagued me throughout my illness.

• Extracted from Smile Or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America And The World, by Barbara Ehrenreich, to be published by Granta on 14 January at £10.99. To order a copy for £9.99, with free UK p&p, go toguardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. Ehrenreich will be delivering a Sunday Sermon on Optimism at Conway Hall, London WC1 on 10 January at 11.30am. For more information, visittheschooloflife.com/sermons.