This brings us back to an important facet of understanding human responses to illness—stigma and the ethical narratives we construct around illness. My dad had cancer twice when I was a kid, and I saw some of this up close. People said he had cancer because his parents had smoked, or because he didn’t exercise enough, or because he didn’t eat broccoli, or whatever. And it’s true that secondhand smoke and poor diet are risk factors for cancer, but it is also true that the vast majority of people whose parents smoked do not get cancer when they are a thirty-two-year-old father of two toddlers.
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