Eli5 How does radiation therapy actually work? Like how doesnt it break down more of the body and make the cancer worse or something like that? And does it target only cancer area or everything?
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Almost all cancer therapy does precisely one thing. Destroys the tissue that’s cancerous.
Whether you burn it, poison it, cut it out, radiate it, chemically dissolve it, whatever… that’s the only way to “treat” cancer once you have it. You just hope that the surgeon lasered / scalpelled / incinerated / poisoned / radiated / amputated enough of it so that it does regrow.
Cancer is basically one of your own cells reproducing uncontrollably and never getting the “STOP!” signal from its DNA, etc. All your cells multiply all the time, but they know when to stop. When the “STOP!” signal gets corrupted (by old-age, radiation, random mutation, carcinogenic substances, etc.) that ordinary skin, blood, brain, or whatever cell turns into cancer… it just keeps reproducing. And the things it produces also have that same error. So you started with one cancerous cell. And now you have 2. No, 4. No, 8. 16. 32.. fuck sake’s, 64…
There is no real way to get EVERY one of those cells and get them to ALL stop reproducing. And you only have to miss ONE CELL for the cancer to return.
Thus almost all cancer treatment after diagnosis is based about trying to contain it, remove it and destroy it all… including surrounding healthy tissue. Because you just can’t take the chance that you missed a bit of it. So you cut it out, and everything around it, with a nice large safety barrier that you remove from healthy organs, tissues, etc. too in order to make sure you capture all the cancerous cells.
Radiation therapy does it by literally aiming radiation at the tumour. Radiation kills things. Aimed at the cancer, it kills the cancer and the surrounding tissue. Voila. With any luck, cancer gone. Chemotherapy poisons it. Surgery cuts it out or chops off that part of your body entirely.
All of modern medicine – and some parts are very high-tech even in cancer treatment such as the drugs, etc. – is inferior to basically just burning/cutting/removing the cancer and stuff around it.
P.S. You have cancer right now. So do I. So does everyone. Dozens of times a day, a cell somewhere goes cancerous in your body. But the body’s immune system detects it, tags it, destroys it itself. You get *diagnosable* cancer when the body fails to do that. Some treatments revolve around trying to make the immune system see the cancer (but it’s already missed it, because it’s literally PART OF YOU that’s cancerous and it doesn’t want to attack you!). Some treatments involve killing off your immune system because it’s making the problem worse or getting in the way or a side-effect of the treatment (e.g. chemotherapy).
But cancer is an inevitable consequence of being a cell-based lifeform. If you don’t die of anything else, you’ll die of cancer eventually. Because you’re getting it all the time, and it’s only when your body fails to notice that something is cancer that it becomes a problem.
But all of modern science – as amazing as that is – is practically inferior to chopping the cancer out of you, burning everything around it, and poisoning the entire area in the hope that you’ll kill off the cancer without killing off too much of you.
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