Media Commercials Conveying Awareness Regarding Prevention of Head and Neck Cancer by Focusing on Stigmatized Perspective of Disease: Right or Wrong?

Cancer in the head and neck region is among the most common cancer around the world, the incidence of which keep increasing in past years. Treatment of disease is usually done by the surgical excision which often leads to some degree of facial disfigurements which cause mutilation in patients. Mutilation imparts the feeling of stigma in patients, and patients usually tend to hide facial disfigurements using additional clothing. As a prevention strategy, awareness regarding the disease conveys to the mass population via media commercials. Media commercials which highlight the adverse outcomes of cancer are found to target the stigmatized perspective of disease. On the brighter side, more stigmatized is the patient image in the commercials, more motivation it will create in masses to avoid risk factors like tobacco, smoking and alcohol. But on the darker side, stigmatized commercials create a social environment in which people tend to maintain social distance to cancer patients, and patients have to bear social disapproval by society for their whole life. It reduces the self-esteem and quality of life of patients which affects their overall survival. In the present article, we review the status of stigma in head and neck cancer patients, tools that are available for assessment of stigma, and effects of the stigmatized media commercials on the patient’s self-esteem. The present article represents the accurate picture of the problem and highlights the policies which could be employed to balance the paradox of stigmatized media commercials and a healthy social environment for cancer patients.