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Comment by tsoukase | Hacker News Reader

Not GP. Clinico-laboratory detected cancer will never resolve without treatment and will lead to death, fast or slow. I do not understand the second point. Anticancer treatment is very stressful and damaging in many ways (middle ages' level of technology...) but care is taken that its side effects are less than the desired ones

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https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/prostate-cancer-low-risk...

> It’s an unexpected question that has stirred the world of cancer treatment in recent years, most notably now with prostate cancer. A growing number of doctors are advocating what might seem like an unusual position: That low-grade prostate cancers that grow very slowly or not at all shouldn’t be called cancer or carcinoma.

> The reason, they say, is that those words scare men, their families and sometimes even their doctors into seeking more aggressive treatment than patients need—leaving men with debilitating side effects—rather than pursuing a carefully monitored wait-and-see approach.

This is not cancer resolution. This is 'You die from another cause before you die from the cancer' (I cannot remove the 'lead to death' from my answer above) For the patient it is the same, for the doctor (definition, surveys) it is different

If the cancer doesn’t grow or goes into spontaneous remission (which you claimed doesn’t happen yet is documented to happen, with a frequency that we do not have the data to determine, and for reasons we do not have the data to determine—with the implication that we cannot reliably causally connect it to treatment) then claiming “it leads to death anyway but something else gets you first” is not even logically true (let alone the fact that you would have no way to prove it, or that it would have no practical implications except perhaps creating undue agitation, contributing to inflammation and so on). It would lead to death the same way breathing, drinking water, or living leads to death.

> For the patient it is the same, for the doctor (definition, surveys) it is different

The whole point of the article is that it is different for the patient, leading to worse outcomes if the patient recognizes cancer as cancer.

> (middle ages' level of technology...)

Star Trek reference?

Modern available therapies:

1. Resect the cancer with healthy tissue without knowing the actual borders

2. Pour poisons until just before the patient surrenders and hope for the best

3. Bombard with ionising radiation (Hippocrates: if all therapies fail, apply cauterization)

Actually it is Ancient technology.

Cancers are not all deadly. even big ones.

I think the problem is that this conversation is lacking in precision of language. Amongst doctors the word cancer carries minimal value. Describing a mass as (in simple terms) a locally invasive carcinoma or an encapsulated adenoma gives a much better idea of expectations and a basis for factual claims. In fact the entire point of a histopath report is to give descriptive language that sufficiently grounds the findings in a usable level of detail for treatment/prognosis/etc.

Saying "cancers are X" will just invite anecdotal comments that refer to completely dissimilar processes.

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