Making Sense of Cancer with Hannah Fry

Hannah Fry is a professor of maths and is used to investigating the world around her through numbers. When she's diagnosed with cervical cancer at the age of 36 she starts to interrogate the way we diagnose and treat cancer by digging into the statistics, to ask whether we are making the right choices in how we treat this disease. Are we sometimes too quick to screen and treat cancer? Do doctors always speak to us honestly about the subject? It may seem like a dangerous question to ask, but are we at risk of over-medicalising cancer? At the same time, Hannah records her own cancer journey in raw and emotional personal footage, where the realities of life after a cancer diagnosis are laid bare. Hannah meets with doctors and cancer patients to understand what treatments are recommended for patients and why. She unearths the careful balance of benefit and harm that comes with these decisions, as many of the treatments cause serious side-effects. It leads Hannah to ask whether we are too risk-averse in our attitudes towards cancer - whether we accept treatments without a thorough understanding of the sometimes marginal benefit they give us and are too dismissive of the side effects. When Hannah has to contend with significant side effects from her treatment, she starts to question her own choices. Her quest to dig into cancer numbers leads Hannah to the controversial issue of screening for cancer, where she learns why searching for cancer might not always be a good thing. The film is both intellectually curious and emotionally unflinching in its desire to find the truth about cancer care.