Be a Lifelong Learner: Raising Your Medical Literacy Improves Anticancer Outcomes

Generally, the higher a cancer patient's education, the longer the survival. This relates to many factors: on one hand, better-educated patients have stronger learning ability and can acquire more anticancer knowledge to make up for the shortcomings of conventional treatment and improve outcomes; on the other, higher education also means higher income, enabling access to quality treatment.

I very much hope that fellow cancer patients will actively learn all kinds of anticancer knowledge—but where on earth should they learn it from? That is itself a problem.

At present, many people in China write popular-science medicine articles, but compared with the popular-science writing of doctors in Europe and America, our medical popularizers (myself included) are still writing at too shallow a level.

For one thing, the standard of medical education in China lags behind, and the overall quality of doctors has not yet reached that of developed countries—especially their writing. When I read the works of some foreign colleagues, I often feel humbled: their vision is broad, their knowledge wide, and their prose fluent.

Some foreign medical popular works have high literary value—for example, the American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and The Gene: An Intimate History, and Dr. Atul Gawande, author of the "Being Mortal" trilogy; their writing is excellent. Every month I read a few popular-science books by foreign doctors; their works are broad in scope and highly readable.

For another thing, many writers of medical popular articles in China are impatient for quick success. To chase more traffic and profit, they prefer to write shallow but eye-catching pieces, their titles and content crammed with gimmicks. So their writing tends to follow trends without much quality. Far from bringing patients truly valuable help, it may actually mislead them.

I advise patients to settle down and read at least one good-quality popular medical book a month, drawing nourishment from it. You cannot leave your medical knowledge at a superficial level—many patients believe a positive mindset can fight cancer, but that is only a very shallow understanding, and it is far from enough. We also need to understand how our bodies work, what causes disease, how our immune system functions, and to have a clear grasp of the effects of various foods and exercises. Many cancer patients have benefited precisely from knowledge overlooked by clinicians (most clinicians are too busy to explain these things to patients), and have thereby extended their lives.

I have a reading method of my own that I would like to recommend to readers. I bought a portable Kindle e-reader (a decent one costs only a few hundred yuan; I personally recommend one with a night-reading mode so you can read in bed before sleep), and I have a Kindle account (you can register on Amazon's Chinese site, www.z.cn). I often browse the Kindle store for medical books and read their sample chapters, which are free. If the sample prose is fluent and the content interests me, I either borrow it (Kindle Unlimited costs only about 80-plus yuan a year and lets you borrow many books, just as from a library) or buy it to read.

You can also download the Kindle app on your phone, log into your account, and read the books you have borrowed or bought on the phone. I use my large blocks of time for printed books and my fragmented time for the e-books on my Kindle; accumulating day by day, I have learned a good deal.

I suggest my readers also read some substantial works in this way—such investment in knowledge is worth it; do not always read only shallow, unsystematic online articles.

I myself have plans to write some such systematic works, but completing such writing will take a long time. I need to keep accumulating deeply before I can produce something of value. Until my own books come out, I will often share with my readers the valuable popular medical books I have read, and I hope patients will take the time to read them.

For cancer patients, actively learning and raising their own medical literacy brings a hundred benefits and not a single harm to their anticancer journey. The more popular medical books a patient reads, the less easily they are confused by all sorts of chaotic information, and the calmer and more rational they become when choosing a doctor and making treatment decisions. Such patients live longer and better than those who drift along blindly and rush from one doctor to another in panic.

Reading popular medical books also helps patients understand their doctors better. Fighting cancer requires long-term, deep cooperation between patient and doctor; if the patient lacks understanding of the doctor's work, their communication can hardly go deep, and the doctor's help can only remain superficial.