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
Cancer is made of cells almost identical to the rest of your body’s cells. The biggest difference is that cancer has gone rogue and is trying to grow more of itself like a yeast, whereas healthy cells are trying to cooperate with the rest of your body. Medicine often works by exploiting a difference between disease and healthy flesh to kill the disease without harming you, but it’s hard to do that with a disease that only differs from healthy flesh by where it is and how it behaves.
When you detect cancer, you’ve detected a location where some cells are misbehaving. You can tell a surgeon to remove a chunk of flesh from that location and hope for the best, but you can’t be sure they got all the bad cells and you can’t keep them from removing some healthy tissue in the process. If you have a cancer that’s likely to kill you if untreated, only in one place, and surrounded by tissue you can afford to lose, like a dark colored skin cancer that hasn’t spread yet, that’s a great tradeoff. If your cancer is unlikely to kill you (like prostate or thyroid cancer with no symptoms), or if it’s in more than one place, or if it’s surrounded by tissue you can’t afford to lose (like brain cancer), surgical removal might not be worth it.
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