Perhaps the main reason our psycho-oncology deserves your full attention - and a prominent place in the study of oncology - is because, as humans, our emotional and cognitive perceptions of malignancy account for more than half of the suffering, stress and misery that we often experience as agonized individuals, and equally concerned families, afflicted by cancer.

By way of contrast, consider that cancer seems to be about as prevalent in aging dogs as it is in humans of similar age. I recently read or heard somewhere, perhaps in connection with a recently televised Dog Show, that cancer occurs in some 50% of dogs that live to an old age.

If cancer is indeed that prevalent in senior canines, such dogs must have a subjective experience, but a very different kind of subjective cancer experience, or psycho-oncology, than humans do - if any rational "understanding" of it at all.

All other mammals but us are spared the exquisite anxieties and elaborate worries that we humans generate and suffer when faced with cancer. Our Psycho-oncology is the main thing - if not the only thing - that significantly distinguishes human cancer from all other mammalian malignancies. Reminded of that essential difference, if psycho-oncology is not worth our serious attention as human cancer patients, I don’t know what is. Shall we begin?