ABSTRACT
A cancer diagnosis brings a person into a highly contested arena: competing definitions and explanations of the disease and how to treat it circulate widely in professional and popular contexts. Different expert knowledges wrestle for the power to determine exactly what cancer is. In some ways, of course, it is a meaningless term, including so many different diseases and treatments that any generalisations are rendered redundant (Rose, 1995). Biomedical information about cancer tends to be divided according to the origin of the malignancy, and patients who wish to know more about their cancer need to consult quite specialised textbooks in order to obtain a really detailed account of what is likely to happen to them. Shortly after my diagnosis, I found myself engaging with two opposing accounts of my disease: on the one hand, I read medical textbooks about teratomas, and endodermal sinus tumours in particular; on the other, I began what proved to be the first of many encounters with alternative medical approaches to cancer which offered very different readings of my condition.
