‘What the medications do is that lovely four-lettered word – hope’

Cancer has high morbidity and mortality in the United Kingdom, with breast, prostate, lung and bowel cancer accounting for over half of the malignant cancers in England. Oral and non-oral pharmaceuticals are key parts of treatment to optimise health outcomes. Merleau-Ponty theorised that human experience can be ‘prereflective’ or ‘perceptive’. Prereflective experiences are intuitive or natural responses based on expectations. A transcendental phenomenological approach was adopted to identify the essence of the lived experience. The essence of a phenomenon describes both the noema, ‘what is experienced’, and the noesis, ‘how it is experienced’. The noema refers to the objective, physical aspects of the experience, for example, what medications are used, or what happens physically when medications are used. Phenomenologists ‘bracket’ their presuppositions in an effort to reduce bias. A convenience sample of participants was recruited from four general practices in North East England, United Kingdom, between April and June 2014.