About After Diagnosis

A cancer diagnosis rearranges everything in a single afternoon. Within hours you are handed words you have never heard, decisions you did not know existed, and a search bar that answers every question with either false hope or fresh fear.

There is a strange gap in modern medicine. The science is extraordinary, and it moves faster every year — yet almost none of it reaches the people who need it most in a form they can actually use. Between the peer-reviewed journal and the frightened family at two in the morning, there is very little. Headlines exaggerate. Forums frighten. Sales pages prey. And the one person truly qualified to explain it all — your oncologist — has fifteen minutes.

After Diagnosis exists to close that gap.

What this is

This is an independent publication that reads cancer research carefully and explains what it actually says — in plain language, for patients and for the people who love them.

When a new drug makes the news, we go to the study behind it and tell you what it really found, for whom, and how much confidence the evidence supports. When a treatment is proposed, we explain how it works at the level of the cell — what it does, and what it does not. When a viral claim spreads, we trace it back to its source.

No hype. No jargon for its own sake. No agenda but accuracy.

What this is not

Let me be just as clear about what this is not. After Diagnosis does not diagnose, does not recommend treatments, and is not a substitute for the medical team that knows your case. It carries no advertising and accepts no sponsorship — nothing here is written to sell you anything. Every article cites its sources, shows when it was published and last reviewed, and any error we make is corrected in the open.

The purpose is not to replace your doctor. It is to help you understand enough to work with your doctor as a partner.

Who writes it

After Diagnosis is written by Dr. Kadir Sümerkent.

My path to this work was not a straight line. I studied computer science and management, and then spent sixteen years in wealth management and investment banking at some of the world’s leading financial institutions — where I helped build one of the world’s largest investment and risk-management platforms, developed the rule engine behind one of the first real-time credit-scoring platforms, and was recognised as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for six consecutive years.

Then I did something unusual: I went back to school — to medical school. I completed a Master’s in Neuroscience and a PhD in Molecular Medicine, graduating with a 4.0 GPA, with further training through programs at Stanford University School of Medicine and Harvard. During my doctorate, I created and taught one of the first dedicated “AI in Medicine” courses at a medical school — a class of roughly fifty enrolled students that regularly drew more than five hundred each week. With a neurosurgery team, I co-founded the first telemedicine company in Turkey, launched just before the COVID-19 pandemic, which went on to serve thousands of patients when seeing a doctor in person became impossible. I later built Momly, an AI-based child-health application that reached more than seventy thousand parents in the United States before its acquisition. In parallel, I serve as Vice Chairman of my family’s company, where we build energy systems for mission-critical industries.

I share this history for a single reason. Two habits of mind rarely live in the same person: the analyst’s discipline of interrogating evidence — asking what a number actually proves — and the molecular scientist’s understanding of how disease works beneath the surface. After Diagnosis is written at exactly that intersection.

An honest word

Trust begins with honesty, so here is mine: I am a research scientist, not a physician. I will never diagnose you, never tell you which treatment to choose, and never replace the doctor who knows your history. What I can do is explain the science behind your diagnosis — clearly, independently, and with nothing to sell — so that you leave your next appointment able to ask sharper questions.

This work is built to stand beside your medical team. Never in front of it.

Books

If you have just received a diagnosis, my book The First 30 Days: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide After Cancer Diagnosis was written for exactly this moment — what is happening in your brain in the first weeks, what to do and what not to do, and how to begin taking back control, one day at a time. I have also written Why They Do That: A Clinical Guide to Your Child’s Brain, on the neuroscience of child development.

How to use this site

Read at your own pace. Start with the area that matches where you are — understanding the diagnosis itself, making sense of a treatment, weighing a headline, telling hope from hype, or living day to day. Every piece is sourced, dated, and written to be understood on a difficult night, not only on a good one.

If you are here because of a diagnosis — yours, or that of someone you love — I am sorry you are here. But I am glad the work exists to meet you.

Take it one study at a time.

— Dr. Kadir Sümerkent