The flowers came with an educational leaflet and an important message – that women should make and keep their appointments for yearly mammograms.

Breast cancer is the No. 1 incidence of all female cancers in Singapore. According to figures from the Breast Cancer Foundation, 270 women die from it every year.

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If I had my way, the patient would almost always know what disease he had and what he (and his doctors) can do about it.

That's easier said than done.

For a long time, my clinic operated under the name P. T. Ang Medical Oncology Clinic. To this day, many medical oncologists avoid the use of the word "cancer" in their clinic names.

I suspect that we all do so in order to avoid losing some patients from whom the family would like to hide the diagnosis of cancer.

My own conviction that it is best not to hide bad news from patients arose from a study my colleagues and I conducted some 10 years ago.

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Mak Ka Yan fell sick with fever and had unexplained bruises when she was 12. Her parents could not figure out why she was falling sick, and took her to hospital to have her sickness checked.

To their dismay, the blood tests showed that Ka Yan's blood cell counts were low. Following a bone marrow test that was carried out, Dr Anselm Lee diagnosed the girl with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

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I was stunned when the patient calmly told me: "They said that I have no cancer."

Mr Didik had been on palliative chemotherapy for several weeks for metastatic pancreatic cancer when all of a sudden his son asked that the pathology material.

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