Why can’t you just cut off cancer cells?

Question

I know there’s a reason, but I don’t know what it is.

In: Biology

Answer 1

You totally CAN. What you can’t do is remove ALL the cancer cells and even worse than that, you can’t remove cancer cells without removing non-cancer cells. This is not so big of an issue for example with breast cancer. You remove the entire boob and hopefully the cancer cells have not spread out of the boob yet and boom, cancer gone. But of course this is a very drastic measure and for other types of cancer the cells are already all over the place so removing an organ is not enough, plus brain transplant is not a thing yet 🙂