Cancer to Be Redefined?

NPR recently interviewed Dr. Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society about the National Cancer Institute’s suggestion to change the definition of “cancer.” The reason for this is because mounting research shows that many harmless tumors are being overtreated, thereby causing far more harm than good.

As reported by NPR:¹

“[S]ometimes no treatment is needed at all, and that's why the National Cancer Institute recently recommended that the definition of cancer be changed... Their new definition of cancer would be narrower than current standards.

The Institute hopes that keeping the word cancer out of some diagnoses would minimize unnecessary treatments and help calm patient anxiety.

'...Essentially, what has happened is our technologies have gotten so good that we can find some early cancers, or things that look like cancer, that we now know, if left alone, would never grow, spread and harm the patient.

So we're actually treating some lesions that look like cancer unnecessarily,' [Dr. Brawley says.] 'What we're trying to do is spare some people the harms associated with unnecessary treatment...'”

According to Dr. Brawley, thoughts on cancer have started to change as a result of new information. For example, about 50-60 percent of prostate cancer cases would likely be better off being watched instead of treated. Ditto for thyroid- and lung cancer, where 20-30 percent and about 10 percent respectively, should be watched rather than treated.

In the case of breast cancer, about one-third of women currently diagnosed with breast cancer have harmless tumors that pose no threat to their life. As described by New York Times writer Peggy Orenstein:²

“[C]ancer in your breast doesn’t kill you; the disease becomes deadly when it metastasizes, spreading to other organs or the bones. Early detection is based on the theory, dating back to the late 19th century,

That the disease progresses consistently, beginning with a single rogue cell, growing sequentially and at some invariable point making a lethal leap. Curing it, then, was assumed to be a matter of finding and cutting out a tumor before that metastasis happens.

The thing is, there was no evidence that the size of a tumor necessarily predicted whether it had spread. According to Robert Aronowitz, a professor of history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of 'Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society,'

Physicians endorsed the idea anyway, partly out of wishful thinking, desperate to “do something” to stop a scourge against which they felt helpless.”

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