how does chemo not kill if it is poison?
In: Biology
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.
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