I know there’s a reason, but I don’t know what it is.
In: Biology
We can actually cut out cancer cells. If someone has cancer in a limb for example that limb can be amputated.
But cancers spread, so there is never a 100% guarantee that will work. And in places that aren’t limbs removing cancer through surgery can be difficult or impossible due to vital organs in the area.
You can remove the cancerous cells sure, but the nearby cells are probably “infected” with cancer, and unlike a leg you can’t just remove the surrounding tissue for good measure when it’s someone’s brain or heart.
Imagine a wet dog is like cancer, once it enters the house you have very little time where you can grab it and get it out the house before everything gets wet. but once it shakes it self dry removing it from the house will do little for the room, but it will prevent it from making the other rooms dirty. sometimes they will cut off the whole body part or room to prevent it from infecting other parts/room
You can, and we do. But the problem with cancer is that is grows really fast and little bits break off and float around the body, then those little bits start growing in other parts of the body.
When that happens then it becomes really hard to even find all the cancer, let alone cut it out. That’s when we gotta fill the person with enough poison to kill the cancer, but not enough to kill the person.
Answer: Cancer cells are cells where all the bodies failsafe’s for killing a cell have failed and is now creating copies of itself out of control that interfere with the bodies functions. Which means even if a single cell is left it will grow back. So doctors usually don’t even take the chance if its a particularly bad cancer
What is this question? Seriously
That’s exactly what a team in Israel did for a patient with lung cancer.. the lung was cut out, and then the tumors were cut out, then re implanted.
Can’t do it for other organs… yet. Some stalwart probably would.
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.
There are two properties of a “better” cancer to get:
1. It is in a non life-sustaining organ
2. It can be delayed early (at stage 1)
My mum passed away for ovarian cancer & my wife has it (twice so far).
Ovarian fulfills the first criterium, but fails on the 2nd sir it usual presents symptoms similar to IBS etc.
And that’s the problem, when it has gone past stage 1, you can cut out the ovaries, but the cover has already did beyond into the abdominable space at least and you can’t cut that out. The cells will always be there and all you can do is suppress them through chemo but wait for the inevitable recurrence.
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 🙂
it is like having multiple colored clays all mushed together in a ball , say you want to remove Red Clay. if Red clay does not take up too much space, is relatively still together is and big part of it is at surface , yo can just cut most of it pretty easily. But
There might still be bits of clay scattered in rest of the ball, can’t start cutting every small bit out or maybe majority of it is inside of the ball, it would make just cutting it difficult.
Kinda same with Cancer cells if they are concentrated in one spot that can be easily accessible and cut without doing too much damage to rest of body , they are cut but with Clay analogy it is not always an option
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