The PBS documentary series, Emperor of All Maladies, shall be broadcasting its last episode of its 3-episode series on Wednesday night. The documentary was originally inspired from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “Emperor of All Maladies: A biography of Cancer”. The documentary was produced by Ken Burns, for a better understanding of cancer by the normal people.
The current understanding of people is that being diagnosed with cancer relates to an unavoidable death within a short span of time. The documentary helps people to understand that it is no longer the case. The social media sites were slowly flooded with topics related to cancer after the broadcast. For instance, a family had posted about their child being diagnosed with leukemia (a form of blood cancer).
Twitter, for instance, has witnessed a large number of tweets made on the topic. These tweets were made by all sections of people, such as patients, doctors and others as well. In Twitter, more than 250 doctors from the field of cancer biology took part in the #CancerFilm Tweet chat. These were done to impart more information to everyone about cancer. However, these interactions have also benefited those being already diagnosed with cancer. Doctors could help the patients in their battle against the deadly, yet curable disease.
Until some time before, there had been no cure for cancer. However, the present scientific works have brought mankind a long way since then. Although not completely curable, these methods help to increase the lifetime of a patient.
However, some people have not been able to receive the vast array of information the documentary had to provide. This was because peoplhe considered that some parts of the documentary were too traumatizing. The incidents of failures had left some people unhappy with the TV series. However, after the broadcast of the documentary, research institutes such as Columbia Medicine had posted links in social media sites. These links point to the researches carried out by such institutes in the field of cancer biology.