Certain tumors labeled as “cancer” aren’t life-threatening and should be called something else instead, a breast-cancer surgeon says.

When patients receive a cancer diagnosis, they naturally become anxious. But some tumours are so treatable and so low-risk that unnecessary anxiety could be avoided if the medical community stopped referring to them as “cancer,” says cancer surgeon Dr Laura Esserman of the University of California, San Francisco, USA.

Writing in the BMJ, Dr Esserman argues that given how widely tumours vary, both in form and severity, it is ethically unsound to frighten patients by telling them they have cancer when in fact they don’t have a risky prognosis.

But pathologist Dr Murali Varma of the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff, writing in the same issue of the BMJ in a counterpoint to Esserman, argues that renaming certain cancers is likely to be confusing and proposes education as a better way forward.