When “cancer” hinders treatment

Calling the “cancer” of the DCIS can point out to patients that they face a medical emergency requiring immediate surgery and, often, radiation. However, studies suggest that such severe treatments can be useless and overused. The preliminary results of a trial of nearly 1,000 women with DCIS showed that, two years in the study, actively monitored patients did not have a higher cancer rate than patients treated with surgery.

“Many of these cancers did not appear yesterday, so it is not an emergency,” said Dr. Laura J. Esseman, surgeon and oncologist at the University of California, San Francisco breast care center which diagnostic and treats the DCis. “It’s an emergency only because you know it.”

For Dr Esserman, the solution is simple. Call the condition something else: abnormal cells, low -grade lesions, stadium cancer 0, prepare, risk factor for cancer. Renamed DCIS is an “ethical imperative”, she argued, to save industrial animated patients and to move the current paradigm of the treatment of invasive surgery to active surveillance (sometimes with hormonal drugs).

This problem goes beyond the breast. A handful of other conditions ride this intermediate space, including cancers at an early stage of the lung, thyroid, esophagus, bladder, collar, prostate and skin. Some, such as prostate cancer at an early stage, are always called cancer. Others have already had the excised word of their names: abnormal cervical cells, for example, are now called dysplasia.

In all these cases, said Dr. Esserman, the word “cancer” does not reflect biological reality. Cancer “is a burned, something that will grow and take over,” she said. “If the condition is not that, then the name is not correct.”