Armando Orlandi, Medical Director at the Agostino Gemelli University Hospital Foundation IRCCS, shared Oncoinfo.it’s post on LinkedIn, adding:
“Cinema doesn’t just tell stories about cancer — it shapes the collective imagination around it, influencing how patients, families and sometimes even clinicians perceive diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.
I read this poster presented at ASCO25 by Onco info with great interest. It updates to 2025 a line of work first presented at ESMO in 2012 and continued with a 2014 systematic review.
The numbers are striking: 255 films from 1939 to 2025, mostly North American and Western European in origin. Solid tumors account for roughly three quarters of the stories, with breast, brain, leukemia and lung leading — while several high-incidence cancers in the real world remain nearly invisible on screen. When stage is specified, disease is usually advanced or metastatic; chemotherapy dominates the therapeutic imagery, and death remains a recurring ending.
The gap between the cinematic narrative and epidemiological reality is still wide. ‘Oncomovies’ are at once a valuable cultural resource for medical education and a potential source of misconceptions — which is exactly why they deserve a critical, not passive, gaze.
Congratulations to the authors on the work.”
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