“You have cancer” is awful to say, worse still to hear – a gut-wrenching first step along a desperately uncertain journey. The subsequent conversation invariably revolves around a plethora of averages, and test results that, while increasingly sophisticated, are far from perfect.

But should everything we currently call “cancer” have that title? In this week’s BMJ , Laura Esserman argues that breast lumps known as ductal carcinomas in situ (DCIS), which almost never spread and are rarely lethal, should no longer be called cancer. …