How to Think Through a Cancer Decision
Cancer decisions can involve evidence, uncertainty, trade-offs, institutional pressures, quality of life, and personal values at the same time. This checklist is a practical companion to the decision-making frameworks in Navigating Cancer: Between Hope and Hype. It is designed to help you think clearly—not to decide for you.
What the 8-Page Checklist Helps You Work Through
- Name the actual decision and compare the reasonable options in front of you.
- Place the evidence in context using the eight-level Evidence Ladder.
- Audit incentives and institutional pressures without assuming that influence automatically makes a recommendation wrong.
- Clarify what each option is trying to accomplish and distinguish tumor-directed goals from symptom, function, or quality-of-life goals.
- Examine risks, benefits, trade-offs, and opportunity costs with the Risk/Reward Calculator.
- Make your values explicit rather than pretending population evidence can decide what matters most in your life.
- Use the Decision Closure Standard to know when enough evaluation has been done and what genuinely new information would justify reopening the decision.
- Return to the Three Questions when you need a simpler way to orient yourself in the moment.
The checklist does not replace your oncology team or individualized medical advice. It gives you a structured way to participate in the decision, ask better questions, and keep evidence, uncertainty, trade-offs, and your own priorities visible at the same time.
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A Companion to Navigating Cancer: Between Hope and Hype
The checklist operationalizes the book’s decision-making architecture without trying to turn the book into a worksheet. The full book goes deeper into evidence, incentives, uncertainty, decision quality, agency, hope, and the pressures that can shape cancer choices.