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
Risk vs benefits.
For certain cancers, you can’t filter out the cancer. Like blood cancers. You can’t surgically remove blood cancer cells. You can irradiate the bone marrow. However, irradiation bone marrow effectively destroys all blood making ability. So the person becomes anemic and immunocompromised. So if they detected blood cancers, but the patient is not symptomatic yet, they will take the lowest risk approach. Like drugs.
If it’s cancer confined to an area or an organ, again, they weigh the risks and benefits. If removing the tumor is a risky procedure, then they won’t do it until absolutely necessary. For example, esophageal cancer. Removing a tumor on the esophagus is a very risky procedure and has potential to cause a lot of complications. So they leave it alone and treat it with chemo until they fail chemo treatments. Same thing with brain tumors. Going into the brain is dangerous. So they’ll treat it with chemo and radiation before surgery. Even then, if the patient is asymptomatic, they may leave the tumor alone because chemo and radiation can be risky as well.
For other types of cancer, like prostate cancer, is slow growing that many men will die of something else before they die of prostate cancer. So they’ll often just monitor it.
Some skin cancers are localized and can easily be removed without much problems, so they’ll often do that.
Basically, doctors weigh risks and benefits and decide if the cancer treatment will be more harmful than the cancer itself.
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