eli5: Why cant they anesthetize chemo patients so they don’t feel the pain from chemotherapy?
In: Biology
I think lots of people have given a good eli5 for this, but I wanna come in with some more (eli5) depth about why and how chemotherapy causes pain to cancer patients
So I think we’ll all agree, cancer is a disease wherein some groups of cells divide more than they’re supposed to. In an ideal body (in adulthood), one should get no net gain in cells, right? If you produce more cells than you lose you’ll grow, if you produce less cells than you lose, you’ll break down.
So back to cancer, these cells are rapidly dividing, therefore most chemotherapeutics basically kneecap cells ability to divide. For a lot of cells in your body, this is fine- your heart cells and brain cells don’t need to divide a lot. But for tissues that see a lot of wear and tear and therefore need to divide – your gums, your airways, your skin, tear ducts, hair follicles- these are also kneecapped and can’t work as well
This causes your hair to fall out, gums to bleed, skin to be delicate, etc etc. All this is the price for kneecapping the cancer too. The futures looking better though, with time we’ll be able to develop and refine more ‘silver bullet’ approaches to treating cancers, and therefore less side effects on rapidly dividing non-cancer tissues
Source: stem cell researcher, lots of overlap with cancer biology
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