Science: When is cancer considered fine and when is considered calm?

Science: When is cancer considered fine and when is considered calm? Tezzbuzz | 11/03/2025 01:24:32

SCIENCE: After treatment for cancer, the patient can be told that the disease is either “cured” or they are “cured”. But there is a difference between these words.

So what is the meaning of curing cancer and what is the meaning of healing?

First of all, it is important to note that there are two types of cancer recovering: “fully recover” and “partially cured.” Complete cure means that the person is reacting to cancer treatment, there are no symptoms or signs of the disease and there is no cancer cell in their body that can be detected by a scan or blood test.

Partly healing means that treatment is functioning but test shows that some cancer cells are left in the body.

Conversely, when the patient's disease is “stable”, it means that their condition towards treatment is neither improving nor deteriorating.

Doctors cannot guess how much time it will take to recover, so the cancer is likely to return. It may take several weeks or years to recover. If a patient is completely cured for five years or more, some doctors may say that the patient is “cured”, which means that the symptoms or signs of cancer have not been seen for a long time.

However, even if the patient is considered fine, cancer cells can be hidden in his body, which can one day cause recurrence of the disease. Doctors are more likely to say that the patient is “cured”, if he has a cancer that has a higher survival rate when quickly detected, such as breast cancer or melanoma, which is a type of skin cancer.

In this context, the term “statistical treatment” can also be used by epidemiologists. This means that the patient survives for so long that the risk of his death from cancer becomes similar to normal people, Dr. Vijay Trisal, a surgical oncologist at the City of Hope Cancer Research Center in California, told Live Science.

For example, if someone had colon cancer 10 years ago and is now free from cancer, then his risk of dying from the disease is effectively back to the basic risk that would be expected from others of his age, he said.

Nevertheless, the word “treatment” should be used with caution, Tisal said. Although this can reduce the anxiety of some patients and allow them to resume their normal life, it can make others less alert and is more likely to avoid future tests and screening that can help detect repetition, he said.