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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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’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.
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-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.
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