ABSTRACT
Cancer is a global epidemic. While incidence and mortality rates for most cancers are decreasing in countries in the global north, they are increasing in less developed and economically transitioning nations, where the proportion of new cancer cases diagnosed is projected to grow from about 56% of the world total in 2008 to more than 60% in the year 2030 (Jemal, Center, DeSantis & Ward, 2010). The biomedical model of cancer and its treatment as expressed within the specialty of oncology in the global north still informs most international health initiatives. It remains the norm for how specialists and lay people alike conceptualize and respond to the disease worldwide even though many scholars have pointed out the ethnocentric and culture-bound parameters of this model, which asserts that cancer is a natural illness in which the individual patient alone is responsible for prevention through control of lifestyle choices and for cure by pursuing biomedical treatments aggressively.
