Eli5 How does Chemotherapy work? Does it increase the oxygen in cancer cells? How does that kill them?
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It depends. Chemotherapy is a generic term for any drug used to treat cancer, and each drug is going to work differently.
At a high level, the idea is that the drugs disrupt the cell’s ability to make copies of itself. As all cells have a life cycle, a cell that can’t make copies of itself will eventually die out without producing more cells. Eventually, this means that the cells will die off entirely.
Cancer cells are very fast-reproducing cells, so the idea is that you administer the chemotherapy drugs to disrupt their reproduction cycle, but stop before those drugs cause _too_ much damage to other, healthy cells. Bascially, you hope the cancer dies off before everything else. This is why chemotherapy causes hair loss and stomach issues – these are _also_ fast-reproducing cells that are strongly affected by the chemotherapy.
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