Stereotypes About Single People Can Influence Cancer Treatment
A new report highlights how physician’s assumptions can impede care
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Is being single hazardous to your health? When it comes to having cancer, it certainly seems to be: Unmarried people are more likely to die of the disease than their married counterparts, for reasons that have never been clearly understood.
For decades, medical researchers attempting to account for this phenomenon have resorted to harsh clichés. Some have argued that singles, on the whole, have less to live for. Others opined that they lacked the required “fighting spirit,” a curious phrase that crops up in several studies.
But a new peer-reviewed article in The New England Journal of Medicine offers a very different explanation. It reports that unmarried people are less likely than people who are married to receive aggressive cancer treatments that are proven most effective, like surgery and radiation therapy. One major reason for this, according to the paper, is that doctors assume single people don’t have the necessary social support to endure the often -debilitating side effects that come from such treatments.
“We live in a culture that is very couples-centered,” says Joan DelFattore, the author of the study and a professor emerita of English and legal studies at the University of Delaware. DelFattore experienced singleton discrimination firsthand when she underwent cancer treatment in 2011.
“He got totally hung up on my not having a husband and children. He kept asking, ‘How will you manage?’ In his mind, a woman without a husband and children didn’t have support.”
The never-married professor was diagnosed with Stage 4 gallbladder cancer that had spread to her liver. DelFattore’s surgeon agreed to operate despite her low odds of survival. “I knew he was pushing the envelope regarding whether surgery was warranted,” she says.
But the oncologist she saw for follow-up treatment after her successful surgery had a different attitude. “He got totally hung up on my not having a husband and children,” she says. “He kept harping on it, asking…
