If you have cancer in a certain organ (like liver cancer) why can’t you just remove the infected organ and be cancerfree again?
In: Biology
Well, in a sense you can. (Assuming it’s an organ we can reliably remove or transplant.) The trouble is that cancer cells often don’t stay in one place. We might say that you have liver cancer because there is a distinct tumor in your liver–but at an advanced stage, tumor cells can have migrated to many other organs through the bloodstream and lymphatic system. Even though every organ except the liver is doing fine right now, just transplanting in a healthy liver won’t solve the problem. Without treatment, you’d get more tumors throughout the body.
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