Stardom comes with power to influence others’ expectations and hopes, which marketers leverage to sell everything from reverse mortgages to wellness products. If you are a cancer patient, celebrities' cancer stories catch your attention in ways that hearing about neighbors' or friends-of-friends' diagnoses don't.

Dr. Arjun Gupta and colleagues coined a term: time toxicity. It’s defined as”time spent in pursuing, receiving and recovering from cancer treatments.” Considering time toxicity matters when deciding on treatment, especially if dealing with advanced, incurable disease and hoping to buy a bit more time.

For years, I’ve been searching for a better term than “survivor’s guilt” when referring to an uncomfortable feeling that may arise in patients after learning of someone who died of the same disease.

Commandments empower you when they inform and motivate you to be the best version of yourself. I wrote these as suggestions for people trying to do and be their best at caregiving for a loved one through cancer.

Suleika Jaouad is talking about The Art of Survival I’ve followed her story since reading her 2012 New York Times column, Life Interrupted, documenting life as a young leukemia patient.

Patients who are suffering may find inspiration in an idea shared by Martin Luther King. The civil rights icon suffered much pain and loss, including arrests and jail time, the bombing of his house, and death threats.

Much of King’s suffering could have been avoided had he chosen less-risky paths. Unlike King, patients don’t choose to get the illness causing them to suffer. Yet, King’s message may speak to patients because of what they have in common:

If achieving a specific outcome matters to you, here’s some advice: Don’t want that outcome. Instead, hope for it. That suggestion is not semantic wordplay. Hoping instead of wanting can mean the difference between achievement and disappointment. Here’s why:

When patients involved in advocacy are ready to step away, doing so may be more complicated than just saying, No more.

Am I the only person who sometimes feels stressed by text messages that are not time sensitive? At the risk of presenting myself as a carmudgeon, I’m sharing my struggle to highlight a challenge of self-care.

I feel honored that Katie Couric’s video montage of advice for the newly diagnosed concludes with my message about hope.

Two women remembered their experiences from months in a coma. Once recovered, they had something to say.