Following news today that former HP Chairwoman of the Board Patricia Dunn is to undergo treatment for advanced stage ovarian cancer, Sarah Gilbert, a blogger on AOL Finance’s Blogging Stocks, has posted a piece titled: Dunn’s coming indictment: did the cancer make her do it?

“Will her attorney in her eventual trial claim that the cancer made her do it? Dunn, the now-former, now-infamous chairwoman of Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE:HPQ) is rumored to be heading towards an indictment today for her rather pathological behavior, which ran the gamut from lying to spying to generally shocking paranoia. “Separately,” she’s been recently told by her physician that her ovarian cancer (diagnosed in 2004) is “advanced,” and she’ll be starting chemotherapy later this week … It’s not a stretch to me, then, to decide that these two pieces of news — an indictment for strange, paranoid, and yes, criminal behavior; an indication that a serious disease is becoming more so — might not be “separate” after all. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if, indeed, the cancer made her do it.”

For God’s sake, Sarah, ovarian cancer is a deadly disease. Globally, 15,000 women die every year from ovarian cancer, and the five-year survival rate can drop to as low as 20% in some late stage diagnoses.

It’s not that I don’t get your point. A woman dealing with a deadly disease might be distracted, or operating at less than 100% intellectual capacity, and a competent attorney might consider this as a defense. But to reduce this observation to a trite phrase like “the cancer made her do it” is cheap, sensational, and insensitive.