When Dwaipayan Banerjee began studying the lives of poor cancer patients in and around Delhi, India, he noticed something distinctive: Virtually none of them used the word “cancer” itself. One elderly man Banerjee met got upset at seeing a medical van with the words “caring for cancer” on the side; the man insisted he was actually suffering from “oncology.” Banerjee also learned, from a medical resident at a hospital, to think of these patients as experiencing “shak,” a Hindi word implying doubt, skepticism, and suspicion. For a patient, a diagnosis…
