Perspective of a Jewish Oncologist

Perspective of a Jewish Oncologist

By Mitchell Gross, MD, PhD, Faculty and Senior Director, Clinical Translational Program, Ellison Institute of Technology, Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine, USC July 31, 2024
A person with dark brown and gray hair standing in front of a black background wearing a lab coat and black sweater.

While patients most certainly do not “choose” their disease, I have chosen to care for cancer patients. As a physician, I can say it is a privilege to participate in each patient’s cancer journey. Importantly, it is not the work of any one individual, but rather a team of many physicians, advanced practitioners, nurses, technologists, and therapists who must work together to deliver the best care for any one patient. While we all work toward treating and curing a disease, we are also continuously called upon and reminded about the importance of treating a whole person. Judaism helps to remind me of the need to balance caring for the body and soul, as we seek to construct and deliver the best treatment plan towards an optimal outcome.

I am also privileged to work in the medical research community. From science, we learn of the randomness of cancer. The beautiful inner workings of chemicals organized as cells organized as tissues organized into thinking and feeling humans can be so disrupted by “bad luck” and “chance”. As scientists, we struggle to find order in this chaos as we seek to understand the causes and develop new and better treatments for cancer. Moreover, I like to think we can sometimes find a spark of the divine with these insights.

As part of this community of people facing cancer, please consider the caregivers are people too. While patients and families so often must struggle against the impersonal and seemingly heartless medical delivery system, we are doing the same thing from the inside (however it may seem). The overwhelming majority of professional caregiver interactions are governed by a drive to help patients. Please remember that those working at a front desk to the back office and the professional caregivers in between are fundamentally as individually human as patients facing this disease. Sharing appreciation and respect for all members of the treatment team is so important as we struggle together to achieve a refuah shlema (a “complete healing”) for every cancer patient.

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