Interestingly what a "cancer survivor" is, is not as
straightforward as one might think.
Everyone has some
cancer risk throughout their entire
life, but
people who've already had
malignant cancer
once are even more at risk, both for
recurrence and new cancers. This is not
just because the cancer may not have been
completely eradicated, or that the
person has shown a
genetic predisposition for cancer; in addition to
those factors, most cancer treatments (
radiation and
chemotherapy) can
cause
cancer!
Because a person may die of cancer long after initial
diagnoses, in order to
meaningfully talk about cancer survival doctor's need to draw an
arbitrary
line somewhere: currently most studies concentrate on five year survival rates.
That means if you
live more than five years from initial diagnoses, you are generally
considered a cancer survivor,
even if you eventually die of cancer.
One might be tempted to use the phrase "cancer survivor" to describe anyone who has had malignant cancer and is currently
alive or who didn't die of cancer. That may be okay for
casual conversation, but such a term is useless in meaningful
discussion. It requires waiting until all patients are
dead to draw conclusions about whether they "
survived." cancer in the end (I'm not interested in waiting that long to discuss effectiveness of current treatments), or it represents a moving (therefore ambigous) target while patients are still alive. And what about people dying of cancer who are
hit by a bus?: with the casual definition such people are considered "cancer survivors", and being hit by a bus is an effective treatment for cancer since it produces more "cancer survivors" then is found among those not hit by buses. I suppose being hit by a bus
is an effective treatment for cancer from
a certain point of view, but that hardly represents meaningful information about cancer survival.
Really the word "
survivor" in any context implies an arbitrary designation is being made: since we all die, none of us are survivors of any kind (unless some
arbitrary distinction is made based on length of life).