Some cancers are certainly easier to detect than others. In some senses, this makes these cancers “less” deadly. They can still be just as fatal if nothing is done, of course, but the fact that you can spot them early and get started with treatment means that your odds of curing the disease are a lot higher than they would be otherwise.
But what about the other side of the coin? Which cancers are notoriously difficult to detect? Five examples are:
- Lung cancer
- Colorectal cancer
- Pancreatic cancer
- Melanoma
- Liver cancer
The reasons that these are difficult to detect vary. For instance, melanoma is an incredibly deadly type of skin cancer, causing most skin cancer deaths even though only 1% of skin cancer cases are melanoma. People think of it as a very dark spot on the skin, but it often just looks like a wart, a mole, a pimple or something else seemingly not that dangerous.
Lung cancer, on the other hand, sometimes goes overlooked because of how often people equate it with smoking. While the efforts to raise awareness are good — in that they try to get people to stop smoking because it clearly does cause cancer — the problem is that you can get lung cancer without smoking at all. Nonsmokers may think that they have some other sort of issue and never consider that they have cancer.
Regardless of the type of cancer you have, a proper diagnosis at the earliest possible stage is massively beneficial to your health. If a doctor’s error prevents that diagnosis, make sure you know what legal options you have.