Cancer is a propagandist.

Communication among cells (also known as cross-talk) plays a prominent role in the current knowledge of the pathophysiology of cancer and of cancer-associated conditions such as paraneoplastic syndromes and cachexia that are responsible for much of cancer's morbidity and mortality. Yet, biomedical scientists lack an explicit unifying frame that places this exchange of molecular information at the core of their understanding of cancer as a systemic disease. Propaganda is a type of information that aims at misleading, a form of communication intended primarily to serve the messenger. The biased molecular cross-talk between cancer and non-cancer cells can be considered as a form of biological propaganda. I here propose cancer is a propagandist as a metaphor that may serve as a unifying frame to interpret both cancer and cancer-associated syndromes under the same communication-based concept and may thus serve to bring together research that is currently compartmentalized under separate disciplines.