how does chemo not kill if it is poison?
In: Biology
The dose makes the poison. Drinking too much water can kill you, while botulinum toxin, the most acutely toxic substance we know of, can be used medically in very small amounts.
Chemo medications (as well as all other medications) have been tested to find the dose that offers the most benefit while minimizing the toxicity.
If you gave enough of it, you could certainly kill the patient. But these drugs are engineered to be more/mostly toxic to cancerous cells, and then given at a dose where it’s very harmful to those but survivable for the rest of the patient.
Cancer cells are your body’s cells (the immune system can’t ID them as different or “invaders”) with the property that they just multiply out of control. Cells multiply by dividing.
The chemicals in chemotherapy target the processes in the cell that participate in cell division, and basically kill the cell as it goes into the process of dividing itself. Chemo kills all cells that divide, which means “healthy” non-cancerous cells die too if they were in the process of dividing just then.
So the trick with chemo is to apply the chemicals long enough to hopefully kill all the cancer cells, but NOT long enough that you kill TOO MANY healthy cells. This is why chemo can fail, the doctors are forced to stop the chemo after a specific amount of time, cause it would kill YOU, and they have to stop it even if some cancer cells remain.
Chemotherapy does kill cells more specifically it kills cells which rapidly grow and divide, this includes hair cells and cancer cells as a result chemotherapy make the hair fall out at the same time as curing cancer. https://youtu.be/MRRmHf5zr_c
It does, it just kills certain parts of your body faster. Namely the parts whose cells are dividing, which includes cancer cells. Dosage is a really important factor. Too much and you’ll die, too little and the cancer won’t (and then you die slower).
Cancer cells use more resources and divide at a faster rate than non-cancer cells. So the idea is the cancer cells will consume more of the poison and die at a faster rate than the normal/healthy cells.
But this is also why chemo is hell on people, because good, healthy cells do die along with the cancer cells. This is also why they need to limit how long people are on chemo. Because it would eventually kill them.
The trick is the schedule the Dr gives you. Each type of cancer has a different concoction of multiple chemo drugs depending on the cancer. I had stage 3 testicular cancer last year, I had to go every day for a week to the hospital, then the next 2 weeks, only go on Tuesdays then repeat for 4 months. I had to stay there for about 4 hours each day while I noticed other cancer patients only show up for about 20min for their session. Each drug does something different, One drug attacks the protein in the cell while another breaks the cells walls down making the cell die basically.
There’s a lot of poisons that wouldn’t kill you if given in a hospital under 24 hour medical care.
Chemo is killing you, it just kills the cancer faster by damaging the cells in a manner that is magnified by cancer’s increased cell production rate. The idea is to kill the cancer first, then stop the chemo before it’s too late for you to recover.
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