After Cancer: Debate About Terminology Beyond Treatment

medscape

"The debate over labels has heated up again when it comes to describing cancer patients and their experience through and beyond the disease. Should they be described generically as "living with cancer" or as "cancer survivors"? Or should there be more of a distinction made, between for instance, someone who has "acute cancer," "cured cancer," and "chronic cancer," as a group of Italian researchers suggest?
"Until we have resolved this underlying issue of how to conceptualize cancer, then all the new labels in the world will not move us beyond the present situation, in which terminology serves to potentially alienate those so labeled and inadequately captures (or actively disguises key features of) the experience of life with and beyond cancer," write Kirsten Bell and Svetlana Ristovski-Slijepcevic (published online ahead of print on May 20 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology)...........