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
I have breast cancer, secondary Her2+ breast cancer. There are many different types of breast cancer, mine is , supposedly the second most aggressive with triple negative being the most aggressive.
I was diagnosed de novo, in other words it had spread to my bones & liver before diagnosis. In a weird way I’ve been lucky as my herceptin treatment (immunotherapy) is working for me. My next treatment will be my 100th, my prognosis was 2-3 years, It’ll be 6 years since diagnosis in October. I had 6 rounds of chemo at the start to reduce my tumours but as it had already spread my treatment is palliative.
I’ve lost 7 treatment friends since lockdown, most of those with other types of breast cancer, they have all lost their lives around the 2-3 year mark. That’s why I consider myself lucky, I known my cancer will become immune to herceptin at some point, but I keep as positive as I can.
That’s like saying if you have a hand disease the CURE is to cut off the hand.
That’s not a cure.
Chemotherapy nukes the body and hopefully kills the cancer, that’s all.
You should look up what chemotherapy is. Some ELI5 questions are fundamentally good questions, but some are based on mistaken ideas about what the concepts are.
People mean all cancers having a 100% survival rate. There are treatments for many types of cancers, with varying levels of long term survival, but no surefire cure for all cancers.
First, it is important to actually define what cancer is. Cancer is a cell in your body with mutated DNA that turns off its suicide switch and is similar enough that your immune system doesn’t recognize it as a foreign invader. As it grows your body gives it nutrients and it can eventually spread around the body.
Your body normally kills cancerous cells. In addition, damaged cells will normally kill themselves. None of this is foolproof and any cell that divides can eventually become cancerous.
Putting aside the various scientific techniques available to help treat cancer, it is important to have an understanding of why a “cure” is so difficult to come up with. Any cell in your body can theoretically become cancerous at any time. You can’t get a vaccine for that and you can’t pretreat it. Even if you completely remove one type of cancer, another from a completely different cell can show up later in life.
There are outside organisms that can damage cells repeatedly enough that make cancer more likely to happen – cervical cancer as an example. We can greatly reduce the incidence of cervical cancer by preventing the offending organism, but that’s not a cure for cancer as a whole.
There are creatures that live very long lives with almost no incidents of cancer. Research is ongoing there, but short of genetically reengineering the human race there will never likely be a true cure to cancer.
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