When someone has cancer it becomes usual that people around want to cheer they up with sentences or comments. But some of these things to say are inappropiate and have the opposite effect. Although they are said with a good intention. In this post you will find some sentences that a person with cancer doesn’t want to hear.
Post updated on December 22nd 2025.
10 things a person with cancer doesn’t want to hear
1. “Oh, poor… What are you going to do now?”
There is a thin dividing line between empathy and morbid pity. Empathy is the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes to understand they feel worried (which doesn’t mean feeling the same). Morbid pity is a way of saying “Although you are the the one with cancer, tell me you’re OK so I won’t feel that bad anymore“. Before saying anything, make yourself a question: Do I want to help this person, or I just want to help myself to calm down my own concern? If you want to help yourself, you will want to find another way to achieve it.
2. “I know how you’re feeling”
No. Even you have had cancer too, or even you try to figure out how you would feel if you had it, it’s very difficult to put yourself in his place. Each person lives their situation in a very personal manner, under their circumstances and through their expectations. Only the patient himself knows what really means his disease to his vital experience.
Therefore, an “I know how you’re feeling” may seem frivolous, although it is said with a good intention. The most approximate you can say here is “I think I can have an idea about how hard this must be to you“.
3. “You must be strong / You must be positive”
Being strong and positive is not a switch to flip on and off. It depends on personality traits (which are hard to change), on how he has coped with earlier stressing events and on the prognosis of the disease. Even if a person with cancer is “strong and positive”, he won’t be the whole time.
Forcing himself to feel optimistic when he is not in the mood, won’t help him. Just try to imagine all the stones he is carrying on his bag: the disease, the treatment, the daily living, etc. Adding the effort to display a smiling face when he doesn’t feel it is nothing but another stone.
I always recommend people to give themselves permission to feel bad when their bodies (o their minds) aks them to. With no regrets. They will surely be good days. But they can’t be forced.
4. “Someone I used to know had the same. He died”
It would be really rare if the two had the same. Each patient has a different kind of cancer, with different clinical characteristics. And treatments become more and more individualized.
An invasive ductal carcinoma is different than a lobular in situ carcinoma. But both are called “breast cancer“.
On the other hand, saying “He died” is not good for anything. Well, yes: for scaring. We really don’t know how the treatment will work in that patient: efficacy depends on the moment in which the cancer was diagnosed and on how the patient responds to the therapy. A person’s death is useless to predict the death of anyone else.
5. “Try this”
Everyone has heard about foods stand out as the cure of cancer: cauliflower, lemon, soy milk… If it only was that easy! Actually no food cures cancer. Either Bach flowers, homeopathy or acupuncture. No matter how natural these therapies are: none of them has proved to be effective for healing a person with cancer.
Some therapies may help to relieve certain symptoms, if added to the common treatment and if doctor knows it. For example,
6. “It could be worse”
Although cancer is increasingly curable, telling someone that her situation “could be worse” can make her understand something different. Like that her concern is exaggerated and “come on, it’s not that bad”. The fact that a person with cancer considers her disease more or less severe, not only depends on diagnosis. It also depends on her hopes on the treatment, on side effects and on how she is feeling every day, among other things.
7. “Lucky you for losing weight!”
A person that wants to lose weight can begin a diet while the rest of her life is as usual. Or she can undergo bariatric surgery because she wants to, she recovers after a few days and gets back to normal. She loses weight and she considers it a success because it’s what she wanted.
But a person is not lucky when her weight loss is involuntary, as a symptom of a disease or a side effect of a treatment. When she lost weight because chemotherapy took her the appetite off, or because inactivity reduced her muscle mass. In these cases, losing weight isn’t an aim, and it’s not seen as a reason to be happy. What’s more, it changes her body image, something that can be added to a surgery scar or, in some cases of cancer, to a colostomy.
8. “Chemotherapy is worse than cancer”
There are some fake myths going around cancer and chemotherapy. One of those morst spread is the one that states that pharmaceutical industry wants to keep cancer in order to sell more medicines. Or that what causes death isn’t cancer but chemotherapy. Nothing further from the truth.
Chemotherapy prevents tumor cells from spreading and stops cancer growth. It has side effects, as any other medicine, but it wouldn’t be given to a patient if it hadn’t been checked through clinical trials that it’s effective. Actually, each patient is given the most effective treatment of all those available for his disease.
So this statement is, straightaway, false. But not only this. The patient makes a great effort to go on with the treatment despite side effects that often -not always- appear: fatigue, vomiting, hair loss, etc. Telling him chemotherapy is worse than cancer doesn’t help him to build the needed confidence with his doctor.
9. “Don’t even think about it!”
Almost all people with cancer think about death at some moment of their process. They are afraid of dying. When they put it into words, they are asking for help. But they often see that the person in front of them shivers and don’t want to hear about it. If you say to a patient “Don’t even think about it”, what are you really saying? “Keep this fear to yourself, I don’t want to know about it”. You are scared -which is normal- and you want to get rid of your fear.
For the patient it’s a crucial concern. It’s not a trifle. He doesn’t want you to promise him he’s not going to die (something out of your reach), but that you will be besides him whatever it happens. If you don’t see yourself able to deal with a conversation about death, you can tell him “I see you are worried about death, and I thank you for your confidence to tell me so, but I don’t think I am the right one to talk about it“. Or you can recommend him a psycho-oncologist that, probably, will know how to deal with this issue.
10. “Your hair will gow back stronger”
Hair loss is the most visible side effect from a chemotherapy or radiotherapy treatment. It affects esthetics, self-image and self-esteem, specially in women. And she has the problem at this moment. Is it now when she has no hair. Telling her it will grow back later, doesn’t solve her problem.
In order to avoid her to think you are playing it down because it’s just a matter of time, you can try to help her finding a solution: a handkerchief, a turban, a cup or a wig. But always having into account that some people rather leaving their baldness without covering it. Ask before, every time.
Do you have in mind another thing not to say to a person with cancer? Write it in a comment. And if you liked the post, feel free to share it!
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