Visual loss is a very rare side effect of chemotherapy, and permanent visual loss even rarer. The more common and no less serious side effects of heart muscle d

Visual loss is a very rare side effect of chemotherapy, and permanent visual loss even rarer. The more common and no less serious side effects of heart muscle damage and secondary leukemia are not mentioned in the tagline, being ill-suited as click bait I presume. I have given the chemotherapy described here to many patients. There is wide variation in how patients experience chemotherapy. Some finish and tell me it wasn't as bad as they expected. I'm quite sure they only tell me things like this in the privacy of the consulting room. They would never say this to another patient in the waiting room. They feel bad for not having had the kind of widely publicised terrible experience. Beyond the tagline, the account is reasonably accurate, although at times indulges in melodrama, about mitochondria of all things. It also doesn't do a good job of talking about the cognitive dysfunction associated with chemotherapy. This is a complex issue. In randomised trials, patients receiving placebo cancer treatments tend to report high rates of some cognitive problems. That chemotherapy itself is causal in every case is certainly in doubt. The mere experience of being diagnosed with cancer as you might imagine can have profound cognitive effects. I am not quibbling for the sake of it. There are patients who decide not to have chemotherapy, and sometimes what they have heard about the experience from 'alternate' channels (such as newspaper taglines) has an out-sized influence on their decision. This is why a responsible editorial team would have had this article reviewed by medical professionals and patient advocates, and taken their advice about more judicious highlighting of potential side-effects. The article also doesn't quite deal with the fact that triple negative breast cancer is a really bad disease to have. Metastatic disease has a median overall survival of 18 months. If chemotherapy had not completely eradicated the cancer as it did in her case (the chances are about 50-50), 40% of patients develop metastatic disease in 3 years.