A close family member of mine, with terminal cancer , recently stopped chemo after 3 years because it created more problems than solving them eg blood problems, heart problems etc.
How does chemotherapy actually work? What is the aim of it?
In: Biology
Chemotherapy is basically killing cells in the body. It is literally poison. There are some more complexity to this, targeting specific types of cells, targeting cells that use more energy, cells that multiply, etc. But essentially chemotherapy will kill both cancer cells and healthy cells. The problem with cancer is that the cancer cells are actually regular cells with the same genes and structure as healthy cells. They are not different from healthy cells in other but one critical thing. So it is very hard to kill only the cancer. What we do to treat cancer, and this is true for both chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, is to kill a lot of cells, both healthy and cancerous, hoping that we are able to kill all the cancerous cells and only some of the healthy cells. The issue is that killing a bunch of healthy cells does create a lot of symptoms. Often these symptoms can be worse then the symptoms from the cancer and can even be fatal.
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