What Conventional Oncology Gets Wrong About Healing

A naturopathic integrative oncologist on the gaps that matter

By Dr. Lena Suhaila, ND, FABNO

There’s a phrase that circulates freely in oncology clinics, in tumor boards, in the brisk hallways of cancer centers: the patient tolerated the treatment well. It’s written in charts. It’s spoken in case reviews. It’s offered to families as reassurance.

What it means, stripped of its clinical neutrality, is this: the treatment did what we needed it to do, and the body survived.

Tolerated. As though the body were a bystander in its own story. As though surviving the medicine were a form of compliance rather than a profound act of biological endurance. As though the person inside that body, with her fear and her hunger and her grief and her intelligence, were incidental to the account.

If you’ve sat in an oncology waiting room recently, you probably already know what I’m describing. You’ve felt the moment when you stopped being a person with a life and became a case with a pathology. When the conversation moved faster than your ability to process it. When you wanted to ask something that felt too big or too strange for the room. That feeling isn’t in your head. It’s the design of the system you walked into, and it’s worth understanding clearly.

The War Metaphor and What It Costs

We’ve been fighting cancer for over fifty years. The United States declared war on it in 1971. We’ve been losing and winning and losing again ever since, and through all of it we’ve carried the war metaphor without seriously interrogating what it does to the person who has to embody it.

When the body becomes a battlefield, it loses its sovereignty. When cancer becomes the enemy, everything that supports the cancer, which is to say, everything that is the body, becomes suspect. The immune system. The microbiome. The hormones. The emotional landscape. The life that was being lived before diagnosis.

The war metaphor authorizes a particular kind of violence. It licenses the burning of tissue, the poisoning of blood, the removal of organs, the suppression of biological systems that took decades to develop, in the name of eradicating the enemy. And it places the patient in the position of territory rather than participant. The battle is conducted on her. Not with her.

What happens to the psyche in that context isn’t a secondary concern. Gabor Maté writes in The Myth of Normal that the medical system “tends to focus on the disease rather than the person who has it, on the body part rather than the whole human being, and on biological processes in isolation from the emotional, psychological, and social context in which illness arises and unfolds.” That’s not a philosophical observation. It’s a description of the lived experience of most cancer patients, and it has biological consequences that the system is only beginning to reckon with.

People who enter the cancer system as full human beings frequently emerge from it having learned to relate to their own flesh as something dangerous and unreliable. The body that harbored cancer becomes the body that can’t be trusted. That’s not a side effect of the treatment. It’s a structural outcome of a system designed around the disease rather than around the person who has it.

The Moment You Disappear

There’s a specific moment that nearly every cancer patient can identify. It happens early in the diagnostic process, and it’s the moment they feel themselves begin to disappear.

The questions narrow.

When did you first notice it? Any family history? Are you a smoker?

The questions aren’t wrong. They’re necessary. But they’re not sufficient, and in most conventional settings, they’re all that gets asked. The person who carried that lump through months of anxiety before finally naming it out loud doesn’t make it into the chart. The family history that is also a history of displacement, chronic stress, and unprocessed loss doesn’t make it in either. The decades of a life that preceded the diagnosis are rendered clinically irrelevant in a matter of minutes.

Maté is direct about this: “When we don’t ask why, we’re restricted to asking only what, which, and how.” In oncology, the why is rarely asked. And what can’t be asked can’t be addressed. What can’t be addressed doesn’t heal.

What If We Asked Different Questions

Imagine if the first appointment after a diagnosis looked different. Not longer, necessarily. Not less clinical. Just oriented differently, toward the person rather than exclusively toward the pathology.

What if, before reviewing the imaging or discussing the treatment plan, a practitioner simply asked: what was your life like in the years leading up to this? Not as a checkbox. As a genuine inquiry. Because the research is unambiguous that the conditions in which cancer develops are rarely purely biological, and the story of someone’s life in the years before diagnosis is often the most clinically relevant information in the room.

The questions that open this territory aren’t complicated. They require time and genuine attention, which is exactly what the conventional system struggles to offer. But consider what becomes available when a clinician asks things like: what were you carrying in that period that felt too heavy to put down? Or: were there things happening in your body that you noticed and dismissed? Or: what in your life felt like it had no exit?

That last question comes directly from Maté’s clinical work with chronically ill patients. He found, consistently, that the experience of perceived helplessness, of being trapped in a situation with no visible way out, whether in a relationship, a job, a caregiving role, or a grief that had no space to be expressed, preceded the onset of serious illness with striking regularity. Not because the person caused their cancer by being unhappy. But because the biological environment that chronic, inescapable stress creates over years is one in which malignancy finds easier purchase.

A question like what were you not allowed to feel during that time? sounds like it belongs in a therapist’s office. In fact, it belongs in every intake for a newly diagnosed cancer patient, because suppressed emotional experience has measurable physiological consequences. Research by Pennebaker and colleagues demonstrated that the inhibition of emotional expression is associated with increased autonomic nervous system activity and greater vulnerability to stress-related illness. What we can’t express, the body eventually expresses for us.

Questions about the social body matter as much as questions about the physical one. Who were you able to be fully honest with during those years? Where did you feel genuinely safe? Social isolation and lack of perceived support are not just quality-of-life concerns in oncology. They’re prognostic factors. A landmark meta-analysis found that social isolation was associated with significantly worse cancer survival outcomes, comparable in effect size to well-established biological risk factors.

And then there are the questions that look forward rather than backward. What does your life need to look like for healing to feel possible? This isn’t a motivational exercise. It’s a clinical one. A person who can’t imagine a future worth healing toward is in a different biological and psychological situation than one who can name, specifically, what she’s moving toward. Meaning and purpose aren’t soft concepts in integrative oncology. They’re part of the terrain.

None of these questions replace the clinical workup. They complete it. They give the clinician a map of the whole person rather than just the tumor. And they give the patient something arguably more important: the experience of being asked. Of having someone treat the life that preceded the diagnosis as relevant to the healing that follows it. For many people, that experience alone is something they haven’t encountered anywhere in the conventional medical system. And its absence, the absence of being fully seen inside an experience this large, is its own form of harm.

The Body Keeps the Score, and So Does Cancer

One of the most significant bodies of research that conventional oncology has been slow to integrate is the relationship between trauma, chronic stress, and disease. Bessel van der Kolk’s foundational work demonstrates that traumatic experience doesn’t just live in memory. It lives in the body, reshaping nervous system regulation, immune function, hormonal patterns, and the inflammatory environment in which all disease, including cancer, develops and progresses.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, one of the largest investigations of its kind, found that people with high ACE scores face significantly elevated risk for cancer alongside a range of other chronic illnesses, pointing directly to the biological pathways through which early life stress becomes physical disease decades later.

The cortisol flooding your system during every scan. The terror between appointments. The hypervigilance that doesn’t switch off because the threat is real and ongoing. These aren’t just psychological experiences. They’re immune events. They alter the inflammatory environment in which cancer cells live. They affect your capacity to tolerate treatment, to recover from it, to make clear decisions in the fog of fear.

Van der Kolk writes that the body keeps the score, and in oncology, that score is being kept whether or not the system is paying attention to it. Most of the time, it isn’t.

The Particular Marginalization of Non-Western Bodies

The critique of conventional oncology doesn’t land equally on all bodies. To pretend otherwise is to participate in the very erasure being critiqued.

Clinical trials, the gold standard of evidence-based medicine, have historically enrolled predominantly white, male, Western bodies. The data that informs standard of care was largely generated from a narrow slice of human biological diversity. The reference ranges, the dosing protocols, the toxicity thresholds, all calibrated on bodies that don’t represent the full spectrum of people who’ll be treated according to those standards.

Black women, whose pain is systematically undertreated across the medical system, enter oncology already in a context where their reports of suffering are statistically less likely to be adequately addressed. Indigenous patients enter a system that has historically weaponized medicine against their communities and are asked to trust it with their lives. Immigrant patients navigate treatment whose language and cultural assumptions may be fundamentally foreign, while already in the most vulnerable position a person can occupy.

The body that doesn’t conform to the implicit norm of Western clinical medicine encounters not just a disease but a system that wasn’t built with it in mind. A system that wasn’t built with you in mind will, even without malice, cause harm through its indifference. Maté names this clearly: the standard biomedical model excludes the psychosocial and explicitly ignores the context in which illness develops. That exclusion isn’t neutral. It falls with disproportionate weight on the bodies already carrying the most.

What Doesn’t Get Collected, Doesn’t Get Treated

Conventional oncology has a particular relationship with emotion. It acknowledges that cancer patients experience psychological distress. It’s developed psycho-oncology as a subspecialty. It screens for depression and anxiety in some settings. And then it proceeds to treat the disease in a way that’s almost entirely indifferent to the emotional body it’s treating it inside.

If you’ve cried in a consultation room and watched your oncologist glance at the clock, you know exactly what I mean. If you’ve tried to describe something that felt important about what was happening in your body and been gently redirected to the clinical question at hand, you’ve felt the boundary of what the system considers relevant.

Your grief about what’s happening is real and it has a biological signature. The isolation of carrying a body that’s become, in the eyes of the world, a symbol of mortality is real and it affects immune function. The rage, so rarely permitted in clinical settings, at what is happening to you is real and it needs somewhere to go.

Research in psychoneuroimmunology has established direct pathways between emotional states, nervous system regulation, and immune response in cancer patients. We’re not talking about positive thinking. We’re talking about the measurable biological effects of whether a person feels safe, seen, and supported during treatment. The emotional body and the physical body aren’t two systems. They’re one system being artificially divided by a model that hasn’t caught up with its own science.

The Violence of Time

There’s a particular harm in conventional oncology that rarely gets named. It’s the violence of time.

A diagnosis initiates a cascade of appointments, procedures, and decisions that move at the system’s speed, not yours. Informed consent in practice often means being handed documents to sign days after receiving news that has restructured your entire understanding of your future. In a state of acute shock, the brain literally doesn’t process information the way it normally does. Neurobiologically, you’re not fully capable of informed decision-making in the days immediately following a cancer diagnosis. And yet the system proceeds as though you are.

Treatment plans are presented as urgent. Delays feel dangerous. You’re swept into a current that doesn’t pause to ask whether you’re ready, whether you’ve had time to grieve, whether you’ve been able to consult your own inner knowing about what feels right for your body. The right to move slowly through one of the most significant experiences of your life is a form of bodily autonomy. When it’s systematically denied, that denial has consequences that extend well beyond the clinic.

After Treatment: The Abandoned Body

The critique doesn’t end when the treatment does. For many patients, the hardest part begins there.

The post-treatment body is profoundly altered. Chemotherapy affects cognition, sometimes permanently. Radiation causes tissue damage that continues to evolve for years. Hormone therapies restructure the endocrine system. Surgeries change the physical experience of living in a body in ways that are permanent.

What conventional oncology offers after treatment ends is, most commonly, surveillance. Scans. Labs. The ongoing measurement of whether the disease has returned. You’re discharged into survivorship without a map. The people around you expect you to be relieved. You might feel more frightened than you did during treatment, because at least then something was being done. That dissonance is almost universal among survivors and almost entirely unaddressed by the system that treated you.

You’re not the same person who walked into that first appointment. You’re living in a body that’s been through something that has no adequate civilian equivalent. The fatigue that doesn’t respond to rest. The cognitive changes nobody warned you about. The relationship with your own mortality that’s been permanently altered. These aren’t things that resolve on anyone else’s timeline, and they deserve more than a six-month scan and a handshake.

Toward Medicine That Doesn’t Ask the Body to Surrender

None of this is an argument against the genuine achievements of conventional oncology. Childhood leukemia. Certain lymphomas. Testicular cancer. The list of cancers for which modern medicine has produced genuinely life-saving interventions is real and significant and deserves full acknowledgment.

The critique is of the philosophy that surrounds and delivers the science. The model of the body it operates from. The relationships it creates between patients and their own flesh. The populations it systematically underserves. The dimensions of human experience it regards as outside its mandate.

An integrative approach to oncology isn’t the rejection of evidence-based medicine. It’s the insistence that the evidence base be complete. That it include the evidence for what stress does to immune function. For what trauma does to the inflammatory environment. For what meaning and agency and cultural continuity do for the body in crisis.

Maté puts it plainly: healing is possible. But it requires honesty about what we’re actually dealing with. What we’re actually dealing with is a person. A full human being with a history and a body and a life she’s trying to return to. Her healing happens in relationship, with her practitioners, with her community, with her ancestry, with the life she was living before and the life she’s building after.

You deserve a medicine that starts there. Not because it’s gentler, but because it’s more complete. Because it refuses the shortcut of reducing you to your pathology and insists on the full complexity of what it means to heal a human being.

References

1. Maté, G., & Maté, D. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery/Penguin Random House.

2. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

3. Felitti, V. J., et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245-258.

4. Hoffman, K. M., et al. (2016). Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between Blacks and Whites. PNAS, 113(16), 4296-4301.

5. Lutgendorf, S. K., & Sood, A. K. (2011). Biobehavioral factors and cancer progression. Psychosomatic Medicine, 73(9), 724-730.

6. Stanton, A. L. (2012). What happens now? Psychosocial care for cancer survivors after medical treatment completion. Journal of Clinical Oncology, 30(11), 1215-1220.

7. Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confronting a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of inhibition and disease. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95(3), 274-281.

8. Holt-Lunstad, J., et al. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.