One of the most common misconceptions about cancer is that it is one disease. Most people think of cancer as something that will automatically kill you if left alone, but there are so many variations of the disease that this is actually not a given. Every “cancer” is different.
Some aggressive cancers grow rapidly and can be quite serious, but some grow slowly or not at all and may be completely safe to live with. As physicians, we need to help change the way the medical community and general public think about cancer. And World Cancer Day, being marked Wednesday, is as good a day as any to start.
To begin with, we need to be more precise. Science has taught us quite a bit about the disease in the last few decades, so a one-size-fits-all definition is no longer the right fit because there isn’t just one type of cancer — there are many.
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