When “cancer” interferes with treatment

Calling “cancer” DCIS can signal to patients that they face medical failure requiring immediate surgery and often radiation. However, studies suggest that such raw treatment may be unnecessary and abused. Preliminary results From the study involving almost 1,000 women from DCIS showed that two years after the examination, patients who were actively monitored did not experience a higher cancer rate than patients treated with surgery.

“Many of these cancers did not appear yesterday, so this is not a sudden accident,” said Dr. Laura J. Esserman, a surgeon and oncologist from the University of California, the San Francisco Breast Care Center, which diagnoses and treats Disc. “It’s a sudden accident just because you know it.”

For Dr. Esserman, the solution is straightforward. Name this condition something else: incorrect cells, low quality changes, Stadium 0, preference, cancer risk factor. Changing the name DCIS is an “ethical imperative”, she has he arguedTo save patients over unanimous anxiety and transfer the current paradigm of treatment from invasive surgery to energetic monitoring (sometimes with hormones blocking drugs).

This problem goes beyond the breast. A handful of other conditions lies between space, including cancer at an early stage of the lungs, thyroid, esophagus, bladder, cervix, prostate and skin. Some, like prostate cancer at an early stage, are still called cancer. Others have already been cut out of their names: for example, incorrect cervical cells are currently referred to as dysplasia.

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