What does it mean to “cure” cancer? Isn’t chemotherapy a largely effective solution? Why do they say cancer hasn’t been cured then?
In: Biology
tl;dr: Yes, chemotherapy works well for some types of cancer, but for many other types, it is still that most patients die.
First: In medicine, we call something a “cure” if it makes a disease go away *permanently*. For cancer, it often happens that the treatment does not kill all cancer cells and the cancer hence grows back after a few months or years.
A common rule of thumb is: if the cancer has not come back after five years after treatment has finished, it’s probably gone for good and the patient is considered cured.
For many cancers, established treatments like chemotherapy, targeted therapy, radiation, and surgery work quite well: Breast cancer, for example, used to be a death sentence, but now, over 80% of patients can be cured. Of course, even curative treatment is still no fun, due to all the side effects of chemotherapy, but it often really works.
For many types of brain tumours, in contrast, there is still little we can do, and most patients die within months of the cancer’s discovery.
Have a look [here](https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/chart/how-does-five-year-cancer-survival-in-england-vary-by-cancer-type-2) for the survival rates by cancer.
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