Word: cancerous
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...that title, remade in 2006 with Queen Latifah, is one of many precursors to this fantasyland scenario.) The specific lesson to be taken from this doesn't have much practical application, unless the dying start demanding a double room with a billionaire when they check in for their inoperable cancer surgery. But this movie exists wholly in the realm of metaphor, whose messages stick out like placards: Find joy through pain. Reunite with estranged loved ones. Keep hope alive...
From Dark Victory to Patch Adams, Hollywood never found a cancer ward it couldn't spiff up, a death sentence that didn't have emotional uplift. In another new movie, The Savages, the issue ostensibly addressed is that of middle-aged siblings saddled with a cranky dad suffering from Alzheimer's ("Al What's-his-name's Disease," as a character says in the Tom Stoppard play Rock 'n' Roll). But that ordeal turns out to be the work of but a month, not decades - just long enough for the brother and sister to learn the cleansing importance of family...
Scientists are combing rain forests around the world for potential cures for cancer and other ailments, but the residents near Uganda's last rain forests are are not waiting around for a multinational drug company to discover their treasures first. They have always believed that there are cures in the plant life of the Mabira Forest Reserve, the green, leafy jungle that sprawls through the middle of the country. And so, locals seeking treatments for sexual impotence, cancer, malaria and other illnesses are simply taking plants from the forest, parts of which are already in danger of being razed...
...must earn their keep. And ordering CT scans is a good way of doing that: Since the exact reasons (what we call the "indications") for ordering a CT scan in a given medical situation are often vague and fudgeable, it's hard to claim they're over-ordered. The cancer caused by a CT scan doesn't generally show up for decades - and there are all sorts of other intervening reasons why a patient would develop cancer - so no one is too scared of getting sued for ordering a CT scan. Getting sued for not ordering one is more likely...
...reality is that in some cases, you'll need a CT scan. If so, just remember that for you to be there, breathing, you've already beaten the odds of sickness and death any number of times. And you'll probably beat the CT-cancer odds too. If the doctor's answer to your questions, however, is something like "Well, why not do a CT scan?" or "A CT scan would show it too" or "A CT scan would rule out something rare" my response would be "Why not skip the scan?" One in fifty cancers is a hard number...