Which cancers have you had the most success in detecting?
But because no one knows which cancers are dangerous and which are not, doctors treat them all.
What is needed, and what the new test does not provide, is a way to decide which cancers are dangerous and which are not, Dr. Isaacs said.
If many patients with different kinds of tumors started taking experimental drugs outside controlled clinical trials, doctors could have a hard time discerning which of the drugs were working and for which cancers.
The problem is, most current screening tests are not sophisticated enough to determine which cancers might not require treatment — or to predict which life-threatening cancers will respond to treatment.
"The basic premise was to let people choose which cancers they want to beat," said Ryan Bromley, the charity's online communities manager.
The field has a lot of work to do to figure out which cancers, or even which patients, fall in each category".
"But because we can't yet tell which cancers are harmful and which are not, we cannot predict what will happen in an individual woman's case".
Dr. Larry Norton, the medical director of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, said the larger problem is that doctors cannot tell patients with certainty which cancers will not progress and which cancers will kill them, and changing terminology does not solve that problem.
As diagnostic technology becomes more advanced we will be able to determine which cancers need treatment and which can be left alone which should mean far fewer interventions and far fewer men and their families, living with the devastating consequences of prostate cancer – great news for everyone.
