If there’s no cure to cancer then how does one become “cancer free” and how is that different from curing it?
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There’s no single, cure-all for cancer, mainly because there’s no single cancer. Cancer is the name of over 100 different diseases that are all caused by uncontrolled multiplication of cells.
There are however treatments for individual types of cancer with varying degrees of success.
When people say cure, they’re referring to a permanent solution for ending cancer, not just treatment for one person. Even when people are treated, not everyone beats it, it’s not a guarantee. People that are cancer-free have been rid of the cells harming their body but it’s not a permanent fix. People can have cancer more than once and more than one type at a time. So to cure cancer, someone would have to find a permanent solution for all types of cancer that works 99% of the time.
There’s no single cure to cancer because cancer isn’t a single disease, but an umbrella term for dozens of *cancerous* diseases. Some of them are quite curable, especially if you catch them early. And some are still basically a death sentence, like pancreatic cancer.
If cancer is a burgler, beating cancer is like beating the burgler to death or throwing him out the door AFTER he’s broken in and wrecked your living room.
A cure to cancer would be like hearing the burgler jimmying the lock (health screen), and blowing him away through the closed door before he even gets in.
Current medicine can mostly do prevention and treatment, so like not participating in risky burgler-encouraging behavours (like leaving the door unlocked/being seen flashing your cash/advertising your upcoming holiday on socail media) or having a really good lock, or with treatments (like owning an aggressive dog/firearm/high explosives triggered from inside your panic room) for when the burglar gets in.
Successfully beating cancer is curing cancer, but ‘cure’ means 2 different things in this context.
There are treatments for various kinds of cancer – surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy are the main ones. And these treatments can sometimes cure SOME kind of cancers.
What we don’t have is a universal cure for ALL kinds of cancer.
Cancer is a catch all term for a class of disease. There are many types of cancers.
The cells are broken, deformed, when cancerous. A cure would fix the cells. Our treatments remove and/or kill the cells.
If you succumb to cancer its usually because the broken cells are replicated faster than they can be killed ir they relocated in the body to a place where they cant be removed.
Im not a doctor but this is my understanding.
A cure would be like a sniper, taking out the cancer with a very precise shot.
Treatments like radiotherapy or chemotherapy are more like just carpet bombing the whole area and hoping the body lasts longer than the cancer.
we call it cancer after it goes a certain degree, before that everyone has “nano cancer”, but we fight it daily non stop thanks to other cells that kill the cancer/defective cells that refuse to die.
So even when you are cancer free your body is always and always will fight those kind of cells.
One example would be fighting pockets of guerrila fighters in a country, if you fail they grow in numbers and overthrow the gov.
Cancer is your own cells mutating unpredictably and out of control, and have evaded our immune system’s notice. Cures as we think of them in other infections are drugs designed to kill or stop the invading pathogen, like bacteria or parasites, but how do you kill you, without killing you? And how do you prepare such a treatment when literally every cancer is going to be unique, and even will change on its own in time? Because of this we don’t have an easy solution to cancer for the moment. Right now most of our solutions rely on physically cutting out or killing off the area where the tumor is to remove the mass of mutated cells so it can’t spread. Chemotherapy is a treatment designed to target and kill cells that multiply fast, like cancer cells, but they target other cells as collateral damage too.
Apparently if you Google cancer cures there was a couple at the turn of the 20th century. However, it’s a huge business.
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