I know there’s a reason, but I don’t know what it is.
In: Biology
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Many tumors are treated surgically, the issue is they’re not always perfectly circunscripted, making cutting them hard
So ok, they’re cells right? And cells are obviously smaller than you can see, when you cut a tumor off, you send it to pathology, and check margins to be 0,12, or 3, basically meaning if there’s healthy tissue or cancer cells in the margins. Ideally you want to have a good couple mm’s of healthy tissue to make sure you got it all. However, after that, cancer tends to spread, so you could cut a prostate cancer easily, but what if it spread to brain, lungs, bone, and colon? Patient would probably die before you can cut all those tumors, assuming you could even access them
There’s also the fact that some are wrapped around structures that make excisions hard. So if say, a lung tumor is too close to your aorta (thick artery that carries most of your blood, no sane surgeon will risk trying to cut it, since if you Nick the aorta, patient will bleed out in seconds, which is why they might try chemo before, during or after surgery, to shrink tumors, along with radiotherapy
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