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
There’s a very big technical difference between a “treatment” and a “cure”. To this day, we can’t “cure” the common cold, but we can certainly treat it.
A cure is a permanent fix. Chemotherapy is not only highly destructive to the rest of your body (leading to an increased risk of senescent cells turning cancerous) but it almost never completely destroys all of the cancerous cells in your body.
There are some extremely promising “cures” for cancer in testing right now, but what we use in the vast majority of cases are “treatments”. (It’s much more profitable)
It’s largely as meaningless a term as curing diseases. There are dozens of different types of just bowel cancer and probably thousands of different types of cancer in humans. So for some types of Lymphoma you can indeed argue we have cured it yet for other types such as pancreatic adenocarcinoma we basically have no effective treatments.
Chemotherapy is like using a shotgun trying to hit an apple on top of your head.
You cannot „cure“ most of the cancer variations yet. It’s just kill almost all of the cancer cells and hope they don‘t grow back.
Also having cancer is not like having some kind of virus. It‘s your own body.
There are multiple kinds of cells that are mutating. There are medications for specific kinds of cells, but unfortunately you will probably have multiple kinds of cancer cells.
Cause chemotherapy is not 100% effective, when people say ‘cure’ they mean something that would get rid of cancer 100%
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