Why Cancer Diagnoses Feel More Common: An Oncologist's Perspective

Cancer feels omnipresent in modern life, but an oncologist's careful accounting reveals that much of what we perceive as a rising tide is actually the convergence of an aging population, sharper diagnostic tools, and a culture more willing to speak the disease's name aloud. Mortality rates are, in fact, declining — a quiet triumph of medicine. Yet that triumph is unevenly distributed, and the distance between those who benefit from progress and those who remain outside its reach is itself a kind of diagnosis, one that society has yet to fully treat.