The general public definitely doesn't have a great understanding of the word "cancer." Patients often don't know that prostate cancer is not the same as lung cancer is not the same as colon cancer, etc.

And unfortunately, cancer is a lot more nuanced than that with a lot of heterogeneity even within a cancer type, e.g. an 80 year old male incidentally found to have an elevated PSA and subsequent low grade prostate cancer has a biologically different disease than a 35 year old who comes in with de novo metastatic prostate cancer.

I wish we had better ways of predicting what a patient's life will look 1 or 5 or 10 years down the line. We're developing the tools to do that, but there is still a significant amount of uncertainty and we can't eliminate that anxiety for patients. I don't know if re-naming low risk prostate cancer will do that either, but I can't say I feel strongly about it one way or another.

I hope that the population starts to get a better understanding of what "cancer" really is (i.e. a very wide spectrum of diseases), the inherent uncertainty associated with the diagnosis, and that we continue to get better predictive tools in the meantime.