How should clinicians respond when patients are influenced by celebrities’ cancer stories?

Abstract

Despite the prodigious medical literature on cancer care, some patients rely on celebrity narratives as frameworks for understanding their experiences of cancer and as benchmarks for decision making. Regardless of whether these narratives are appropriate sources of health information for patients, it has been shown that celebrity narratives influence patterns of care. Three cases—John McCain, Angelina Jolie, and Jimmy Carter—are presented to illustrate how media coverage of cancer can have unforeseen consequences on individual patients exposed to these kinds of stories. For this reason, clinicians should become familiar with these narratives and comfortable with discussing how celebrity narratives can shape patients’ views and decisions.