Cancer in comics and on TV

I have previously written a post on cancer in comic books, I thought I’d write a little more about the subject and tell you about some of the links I have found since I wrote the first post in April 2009.

Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics) is a daily comic based on life in a research lab.  It is written for students working in biology research labs, so it is very geeky.  If you’re a geek like me it is also very funny and very true to real life lab research. There was a cartoon on the 20th April 2009 on why there will never be one cure for cancer (but there will be many cures for cancers). It’s called “Tales from the road talks about …Cancer”

The blog “Respectful Insolence” is written by a breast cancer surgeon/scientist and has a post called “Cancer research explained briefly” that links to the PhD Comics Cancer Cartoon.  There is a long discussion at the end of the post, I liked this quote in the comments that said

This is a good point, research is complicated, there will be many cures for cancer but even working on one very small part of a very large problem takes years. Scientists ARE people who know “more and more about less and less” but if you want to cure complex diseases like cancer then that’s the way it has to be. As a scientist you get sick fed up of hearing that you don’t “live in the real world”, because you work on some small and insignificant part of a something that no one else understands. All the scientists I know have families, pay taxes, struggle to find jobs etc. What isn’t real about that?

I found a few other blogs about how science and medicine are shown on tv. Here is another blog (Framing Science) discussing how the finale of Gray’s Anatomy was misleading and shows some statistics on how many people use shows like ER to learn about medicine.

For those of you who want to know how much of  the medical series “House” is true, have a read of the blog politedissent.com The episode guides to House are here. The polite descent blog is about “comics,  medicine, television and fun”. If you are in the UK, it’s probably worth knowing that PSA stands for Public Service Announcement and has nothing to do with prostates!  Public service announcement’s in the US are a bit like the Health Education Board Adverts you get in Scotland, they tell you stuff you already know (but probably don’t do), don’t smoke, don’t drink, eat more fruit and vegetables, take more exercise…

Last month, Channel 4 screened a documentary about teenagers fighting cancer, you can watch it on the Channel 4 website.

That’s all the links I’ve found on cancer in comics and tv, but if you know of any more, feel free to leave a comment below.