Sir, Your excellent symposium on cancer (April 6) strengthened my conviction that this misleading word should be abandoned, much as the term “consumption” fell out of use when the nature of tuberculosis was revealed
Thirty years ago I was a busy surgeon, every day seeing patients with malignant disease. I then discovered that I myself had an aggressive tumour that carried a five-year survival rate of 5 per cent. In other words, my chances of being alive five years on was about 19: 1. As a professional in mid-career with a family, the news provoked some serious thought, as typified by the contributors to your symposium. But I was lucky. Thanks to support from skilled colleagues and after radical radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery, I can now write this letter.
Ten years ago I found a small lump beside my nose, which I recognised as a basal-cell carcinoma, a tumour that untreated will destroy the whole face, but is 100 per cent curable. A colleague removed it under local anaesthesia, which took ten minutes, and I have had no trouble since.
To bracket these two tumours makes no sense. Although a pathologist would recognise that they are part of the same disease process, from the patient’s perspective they are as different as arthritis is from measles
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