There are no symptoms in the early stage of liver cancer, and it is very unreliable to diagnose liver cancer based on symptoms. Liver cancer always comes so quietly and without any symptoms. There are many misunderstandings about this issue. 1.Myth 1: Liver cancer will be accompanied by severe pain Many people say, shouldn’t it be very painful to have liver cancer? In fact, more than 95% of liver cancer is painless, and basically, there is no pain when it develops to death. Many people have learned the text “Jiao Yulu” in middle school, which seems to be the earliest exposure to liver cancer for many of us. The text describes Jiao Yulu overcoming the pain of advanced liver cancer through various methods, which creates a misunderstanding for many of us – that liver cancer will be very painful, and conversely, if it does not hurt, there is no liver cancer. The liver itself does not have much sensory nerve distribution, so the liver is known as a silent organ and usually does not show any symptoms. When there is an inflammatory reaction in the liver or when the peritoneum of the liver is stretched because of the large size of the tumor, pain may appear, but this pain is often a dull pain, not particularly intense, and is usually tolerable. And the unbearable severe pain like Comrade Jiao Yulu’s is likely that bone metastasis has occurred. Pain is a sensation, and mild pain is sometimes an illusion. Many people have no symptoms for a long time, and when liver disease is discovered during a physical examination, vague pain in the liver area appears the next day, and it always lingers and does not work well with medication. If the doctor tells them that the liver disease has been cured or misdiagnosed, the pain often heals itself immediately. This kind of “self-imagined pain” is called “liver depression and qi stagnation” in Chinese medicine terminology, which can be alleviated by psychological guidance or Chinese herbal medicine to relieve liver and qi. 2.Myth 2: Liver cancer will lead to obvious thinness Many people think that people with liver cancer will be as thin as bone, which is also a misconception. This is also a misconception. “Dark face, thin bones like firewood, exposed veins and large abdomen like a drum” are some records in ancient books, which are the manifestations of malignant fluid when liver cancer develops to very late stage. As liver cancer continues to grow, it will consume a lot of nutrients on one hand and affect the normal digestion and absorption function on the other hand, which will certainly lead to weight loss. Coupled with the undeveloped imaging technology and insufficient attention to nutritional support in the past, liver cancer was often diagnosed only after the patient was obviously wasting. With the advancement of imaging and tumor marker examination, the early detection rate of liver cancer is getting higher and higher. A large number of studies have shown that not only is there no obvious weight loss in the early stage of liver cancer, but on the contrary, liver cancer occurs more often in “fat people” because obesity and diabetes increase the chance of cancer. 3.Myth 3–Since liver cancer is asymptomatic in early stage, isn’t everyone at risk? It is often encountered that when a patient is found to have liver cancer, all the family members, colleagues and friends around are at risk and run to the hospital for examination. If a person is suddenly announced to have liver cancer, are we also in danger? In fact, unlike other tumors, liver cancer has a lot of common characteristics in its patient group, such as chronic hepatitis B/ C background, middle-aged men, alcohol consumption, family history of liver cancer and so on. Therefore, there is no need to have an unwarranted fear of liver cancer. To sum up, liver cancer lacks obvious and specific symptoms in its early stage and can only be detected through regular checkups. Understanding the characteristics of liver cancer, you should neither be overconfident nor need to be unwarrantedly self-conscious.