One of the most common misconceptions about cancer is that it is one disease. Most people think of cancer as something that will automatically kill you if left alone, but there are so many variations of the disease that this is actually not a given. Every “cancer” is different.

Some aggressive cancers grow rapidly and can be quite serious, but some grow slowly or not at all and may be completely safe to live with. As physicians, we need to help change the way the medical community and general public think about cancer. And World Cancer Day, being marked Wednesday, is as good a day as any to start.

To begin with, we need to be more precise. Science has taught us quite a bit about the disease in the last few decades, so a one-size-fits-all definition is no longer the right fit because there isn’t just one type of cancer — there are many.

It’s like allergies; we can easily understand that there is more than just one type of allergy. Allergies vary hugely in type and severity, and not everyone will lead to anaphylactic shock or a fatality. Some allergies cause no more than itchy eyes or a runny nose. The same principle is true of cancer. And because the term cancer is surrounded by connotations of panic and death, in the case of extremely low-risk lesions, we should reclassify them accordingly.

Participating in clinical trials or registries that allow clinicians to adopt less aggressive approaches to in situ or specific types of invasive cancers is one of the best ways to accomplish this. Clinical trials or registries allow women to participate today in what the standard of care will be tomorrow; they make it possible for us to test and document what we learn so that knowledge can inform the future — and help us differentiate IDLE threats.