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Can you say

Despite initial success, method A has not found its way into the canon of cancer treatments.

What I mean by "canon" is simply that method A is not one of those that a normal doctor at a normal hospital would suggest or would have learned about during his studies.

Looking at Merriam-Webster's definition, I think that the 4.th meaning might cover my usage, but I am not sure because the focus there is on 'principles', not 'methods'. Similarly, most other definitions that I looked at are even more limited to religious, poetic, or musical meaning.

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    Remember that dictionary definitions often lag actual usage by an unknown amount of time. Your usage of canon here would go unremarked by all but perhaps the most pedantic grammarians. Jul 20, 2018 at 12:24
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    Go with what's appropriate for the discipline. The usual term in medicine is "standard of care".
    – John Feltz
    Jul 20, 2018 at 12:36

2 Answers 2

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It is not incorrect, but it would be more common to see the adjective canonical than the phrase find its way into the canon, which is a phrase normally reserved for texts. The adjective canonical is figurative, based on that meaning.

The canonical treatment paradigm for virtually all cancers, including prostate cancer, has been to target the tumor cell directly.

OR

Furthermore, VEGFR2 knockdown BCPAP (shVEGFR2) cells showed a significant decrease in thyroid cancer patients who fail to respond to the canonical treatment...

Thus, something like

Despite showing early promise, X has not become a canonical treatment for Y.

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The definition of the word "canon" appropriate here is:

the writings or other works that are generally agreed to be good, important, and worth studying.

I understand "the canon of cancer treatments" to be the "catalogue", or collection of treatments which the medical profession agree are effective or worthwhile.

The term is not used to describe a complete collection of anything, but rather the accepted collections, excluding things that are considered of having no value, or little worth, or are apocryphal. Items not included in the accepted collection are termed non-canonical.

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