I know there’s a reason, but I don’t know what it is.
In: Biology
Well,… cancer is complex. But in its essence, cancer is a clump of parasitic cells growing in your body, and consuming your energy to grow ever larger. The real issue is that it ‘eats’ everything in its way. If those happen to be essential organs, they get eaten up.
So,… how do we get rid of cancer. There’s a couple of strategies. The real trick here is to get rid of cancer cells and not of the other cells that compose the healthy body. As the cells are very similar it is hard to do so. Chemotherapy essentially kills dividing and growing cells, so it targets those growing tumor cells more than normal body cells, but there are the side effects like hair loss (hair cells are essentially also actively growing cells, so they are affected by the chemotherapy). So, this is the chemical warfare we apply in cancer.
We can use radiation therapy, this basically microwaves the cancer in your body. By using very targeted ‘beams’ we avoid damaging the surrounding tissue, and target only the cancer cells. This is hard, because we don’t see what we’re doing while we’re doing it. This might also be tricky for certain cancers as we need to shoot our radiation through ‘healthy’ tissue as well if the cancer is deep, this leads to collateral damage.
A third, very common option is surgery, whereby you open up the body, cut out the tumor and get rid of it. This is very invasive, often leads to a lot of tissue damage due to the surgery. The big pitfall is that tumors are -most often- not separate organs, they usually are very well integrated in an other organ. This means that the surgical option is often used for ‘less essential’ organs. Typical a breast is removed in breast cancer (you will survive perfectly without breasts) or a kidney, or a part of the gut, or the prostate or…. If you take out the bladder, people need an external bag for urine collection afterwards etc… This is becoming a much larger problem with certain types of cancer like brain cancer, where you can not cut out a part of the brain without damaging other parts etc… So if chemotherapy and radiation fail with brain cancer, it’s often over and out, as attempting surgery (with our current technology) would most likely kill or severely damage the patient.
Other cancers like leukemia are even more tricky, because if you have a cancer of the blood, there can be cancer cell EVERYWHERE. Usually we attack the blood-creation organs (bone marrow) aggressively, and do a transplant with healthy marrow later etc…
tl, dr: Cancer is a bitch, it’s everywhere. Cutting it off works, but sometimes you need to cut soo much off that you would kill the patient.
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