Like if you detect it early enough, I know you can remove it. But what is the point that it can’t just be removed, and why?
In: Biology
The cure can be worse than the disease.
Also we need a target to remove; until we know specifically where in the body the cancer is; it’s hard to find and remove the 20 cells. It’s a lot easier once it becomes a mass of 5000000 cells (numbers for example only)
Because it’s not always caught right away. A lot of the time is not found until it’s causing someone enough problems to actually go get checked out. And by that time, it can be spread or grown in areas that aren’t easy to remove it from without causing serious damage.
Like my mother, when they found hers, she went to the ER because she thought she had a kidney stone. It turned out that she had cancer that had spread and was wrapped around her spine and had eaten away sections of her vertebrae, and the pain was the pressure on her spinal cord.
when cancer is found early, and confined to a single anatomical area, it is surgically removed.
the issue is that cancer spreads microscopically through the blood stream and lymph nodes and can sometimes spread beyond what we have detected. if you put someone through a surgery, but they still have cancer you haven’t done them any favors.
Removing the cancer totally as soon as it’s detected is typically the goal. The problem is when it is detected.
If early (like with screening for asymptomatic people) many times a surgery will completely remove the ball of cancerous cells and that person is good to go.
Some cancers, however, tend to both be more aggressive, don’t have reliable screening for all people, and don’t cause symptoms until they are quite advanced. For example, many types of lung cancer (especially small cell), or pancreatic cancer can be like this. Once the cancer has “evolved” and broken free from its initial mass (ie metastasized into lymph nodes or beyond), it is essentially impossible to surgically remove it all. There are tiny collections of tiny cells everywhere. This is when things like chemo and maybe radiation are attempted to control it, and depending on the cancer that will be more or less successful.
TLDR cancer is not all the same. There are more and less aggressive types, and the more aggressive the cancer the greater the odds that tiny cells are sprayed everywhere and can’t get got.
As soon as its detected is what?
Two problems:
– sometimes it’s detectable in a place where surgery isn’t feasible. Ie if it’s in some vital organ.
– surgery only gets the cancer they’ve detected. Depending how long it’s been there, there’s a chance it has spread somewhere else already but hasn’t grown big enough there to be detectable yet.
We have new technologies that enable this actually, at least for tumors. Check out histotripsy (there is a company called Histosonics doing amazing things. I can speak personally to their work). You can erase tumors with sound waves like erasing a whiteboard.
By the time cancer is detectable at all, much less someone notices and decides to get tested, the tumor likely has at the bare minimum hundreds of thousands of cells, if not millions or more. It might not grow as a nice confined lump either, it could be more vein-like, or cells have broken off to form new tumors elsewhere
Most of the time the main tumor is removed manually, but if the cancer has already spread, the tumor is growing a difficult spot, or a spot where a lot of cutting could kill you, alternative methods may be used.
Some cancerous tumors spread aggressively. Caught early enough they maybe are removable. Once they spread, many body parts become cancerous. Too many to remove. Some other cancerous tumors occur in non-removable body parts. Skeletons are not removable and you need your brain for example.
You might have put this all together by now, but I don’t see this stated quite this plainly, but think about how big a single cell is.
All large cancer tumors start from a single cell, and if you miss just one cell it will multiply again.
Even when we generally start saying that someone has recovered from cancer, technically we can’t say for sure that they are fully cured because it is impossible to be for sure that every single cancer cell has been removed and destroyed. All that can be said is it is no longer detected. You will have to go in for regular screenings to check for cancer again just to see if it started to regrow. And it can take years or even decades for it to reappear.
Once you have cancer, until you die it can not be said with 100% certainty that every cancer cell was killed. It is something you have to carry for the rest of your life. The only comfort is that the longer you go without it cropping up the less likely there’s any left. But no one can be sure.
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