Curing cancer isn't always the goal. Sometimes you just want it to be a manageable chronic disease

If you can’t beat ’em, manage ’em.

Millions of patients live by that rule every day — patients with chronic conditions that can’t be cured but can be kept under control with the right combination of medication, diet and lifestyle choices.

High blood pressure can be treated this way. So can diabetes. And increasingly, the same is true for cancer.

Sometimes patients and their doctors can manage cancer so successfully that it may seem to go away. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. And it could still go rogue at any time. But in the meantime, treating cancer like a chronic illness can often reduce both the financial cost and the physical risks of intensive treatment.

In many cases, patients with less dangerous varieties can safely opt for localized treatment, or even no treatment at all. Not treating prostate cancer isn’t the same as doing nothing. Doctors keep very close tabs on the cancer using “active surveillance.” Then they take action if — and only if — it’s needed.

Prostate cancer isn’t the only type of cancer that is morphing into a chronic disease. In an article published in July in the New England Journal of Medicine, University of Michigan endocrinologist Megan Haymart and colleagues suggest that active surveillance may prove to be a good option for other cancers too, including low-risk differentiated thyroid cancer, ductal carcinoma in situ of the breast, and some skin cancers.

The authors note that active surveillance is not yet a perfected strategy. There is some debate about the best way to conduct it and make sure that patients keep up with it.