Profound gender discrimination, stereotyping, patriarchy, and cultural misogyny are her explanatory tools. Of course, the premise is silly. Next, there are morality tales about people who failed to help themselves and paid with their lives. Then there's advice to individuals to eat right, take vitamins, exercise, and perform other lifestyle talismans to ward off cancer. There is only glancing mention of probable environmental causes of cancer with no corresponding advice to public officials to address them.
People routinely describe cancer treatment as going through hell.
Of course, a few cancer patients don't, and some elect to stop treatment before their doctors would cease. But they are the exceptions. The simple answer, the one we usually tell ourselves, is that people submit to treatment because they see themselves in a struggle with death. But that's too simple. In the most famous of the Federalist Papers, for example, James Madison pondered how to cure the ills of faction with a new constitution and used precisely this metaphor to reject the option of curtailing liberty.