Radiotherapy Has a Voice. Now We Need the World to Understand It
More than 60 radiotherapy centres across Brazil united for World Radiotherapy Awareness Day 2026. But for Denise Ferreira, Director of Marketing and Communications at the Brazilian Society of Radiotherapy (SBRT), the campaign raised a bigger question: if radiotherapy has such a powerful voice, why are we still struggling to be heard and understood?
Denise shares how Brazil embraced One Voice for Radiotherapy and why communicating beyond the radiotherapy community matters more than ever.
Written by Denise Ferreira
This year, Brazil was invited to take part in World Radiotherapy Awareness Day. As Director of Marketing and Communications of the Brazilian Society of Radiotherapy (SBRT), I became involved in the project through Lina and Dr Arthur. The WRAD message, “One Voice for Radiotherapy,” immediately raised a question: how could a continental country like Brazil come together around a single campaign and deliver a powerful message about radiotherapy?
We decided to aim high. Brazil has five regions: North, Northeast, Central-West, Southeast and South. Radiotherapy centres from across the country were invited to give their voice to something we believe radiotherapy represents. The North spoke “for access,” the Northeast “for equity,” the Central-West “for science,” the Southeast “for cure,” and the South “for care.” Together, they became one voice for radiotherapy. More than 60 radiotherapy centres, from the north to the south of Brazil, joined the campaign.
But there was another voice that needed to be part of this story: that of the people whose lives had been touched by radiotherapy. Patients and families from across the country shared their experiences. Among them were a radiotherapy nurse who later became a patient herself; a mother whose daughter underwent total body irradiation as part of a bone marrow transplant more than ten years ago and is alive and happy today; and a woman with symptomatic brain metastases who recovered movement after radiosurgery. Different people, different stories, connected by radiotherapy.
Seeing so many people come together around the campaign led to a more difficult question: we have a powerful voice. But why are we still not heard?
That question became the starting point for an editorial for the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics, the Red Journal. I was not entirely confident that this kind of reflection would find a place in a scientific journal, so I first sent a pre-submission inquiry. Dr Sue Yom encouraged the development of the idea. What began with the Brazilian experience soon became a much broader question about how radiotherapy is perceived around the world.
Writing the editorial took me on an unexpected journey, and I like to think it may have taken some of its readers along for the ride. I started with the way radiation is portrayed in the media, often through accidents, danger and harm rather than treatment and cure. From there, I moved to medical education and how little many physicians are exposed to radiotherapy during their training. For a while, it was quite comfortable to look for the problem everywhere else.
Then the journey took a slightly inconvenient turn: back to us.
We can discuss doses, techniques, technology and evidence for hours. Put us in a room full of radiation oncologists and we certainly have no shortage of words. But how well do we explain what we do when we step outside that room?
That was perhaps the most important turn in my reflection. If patients still arrive afraid of radiation, if misconceptions can influence treatment decisions, and if others so often become the main narrators of our specialty, I could no longer simply ask why radiotherapy was misunderstood. I also had to ask whether we had learned how to make ourselves understood.
And somehow, after all those turns, I found myself exactly where I had started: One Voice for Radiotherapy. Only now, the question was no longer whether we had a voice. We had already proved that we did. The question was what we were going to do with it.
Perhaps this is one of the lessons Brazil can share from WRAD. More than 60 centres across five regions, together with patients and families, showed that a diverse community spread across a continental country can come together around a common purpose. Our challenge is not simply to speak louder. It is to speak beyond our own walls, to make radiotherapy more accessible, more familiar and more human.
We need to be heard. And, most importantly, we need to be understood.
