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?
In: 630
The problem with Cancerous cells is that they’re very much still alive, and they look a lot like regular cells so they’re not being destroyed by your body.
For all its clever evolution, the human immune system isn’t that smart. If it claims to be a friend, the immune system does nothing to fight it.
We can look at cells and critically say “Yup, that’s broken and needs destroying” even if they’re still technically alive.
So most cancer therapies are based on either spotting one of the subtle traits of cancerous cells and using that to target a treatment, or simply nuking the site from orbit with targeted radiation-beams.
The challenge isn’t killing the cancer, it’s making sure the cure isn’t killing anything it shouldn’t.
So yes, Radiation therapy definitely runs the risk of causing more damage. The idea is to focus your attention on just the cancerous cells and anything nearby that *might* be cancer to prevent it from coming back.
What’s worth mentioning is that the generation of cancerous cells is actually pretty rare. If you shoot someone with a narrow-focus radiation-beam it won’t hit many cells, and the odds of those cells becoming cancerous rather than just dying outright is pretty slim.
Usually if you break something about a cell, it just dies. Cancer happens when the cell is damaged but not killed, and then passes on the damage to its descendants, or simply loses its “off switch” and just keeps reproducing forever. There’s lots of kinds of cancer.
So in principle, the treatments run a small scope of generating more cancer, but in practice if you just keep at it with multiple treatments eventually the dice will fall in your favour and all of it will be gone.
Latest Answers