I’m educated enough to generally understand that cancer is the result of a gene mutation, which activates rapid cell reproduction, but what about this growing/spreading tumor makes it fatal? Why can’t we just periodically remove the tumor as it continues grow, thereby (almost) completely eliminating any possible death threat from cancer?
***EDIT: thanks for all the responses to my question! Some of them are really great, and perfectly answer my question. Frankly, I was not aware that cancerous cells and tumors have, in so many ways, “a mind of their own”.***
***I’m very lucky to have been of general good health my whole life, but the threat of cancer as I age scares the daylights outta me — it literally keeps me up at night, often. I’m slightly relieved to realize that so much is known about cancer and so many different treatment options exist, depending on the diagnosis and prognosis. And I recognize this wealth of knowledge, understanding, and treatment options is growing almost by the day with modern medicine — and this helps put me at ease a little too.***
***Here’s to ongoing good health for me and you…!***
In: 10
Your body is like a ship where everyone has their own job. It can be to clean the decks, navigate the ship or fix parts of the ship. Everyone gets their fair share of food dependent on how much energy they need to carry out their job.
Say if a couple on the ship decided they no longer want to do their job and started to have parties and babies all day. The babies grow and mature fast, just like their parents they refuse to do work and continue to have parties and more babies. These rebels hog all the food, take up space in their department/compartment and interrupt their colleagues from working.
They might eventually start to wonder to other people’s workstation and prevent them from working as well. So if these rebels make their way into the engine room and prevent the workers from the engine room to then the ship is not gonna be able to move. Eventually the ship is gonna become too chaotic and things are gonna break down since people cannot do their job and repair the ship and it will just become stranded and decay.
When you decide to remove these rebels, you may be able to identify them by maybe a tattoo that they all have. However, when they are mixed in with the normal workers you might be unable to separate the rebels from the workers and end up culling a bunch of the good workers as collateral damage. Then it would mean that department would no longer be able to carry their job out properly. If you’re able to get rid of rebels and the collateral damage is small, sometimes there might be a couple of rebels still hiding in the department and can then restart the partying and babying cycle.
So with this analogy, the ship is your body, the rebels are the cancer cells. Rebels having babies is uncontrolled cell growth, them disrupting workers around them is loss of function due to cancer. Rebels wondering into other workstations is metastasis and causing other organs to lose their functions. Unable to separate rebels from workers is cancer invasion resulting in the inability to completely resect the cancer without disrupting the organ. The rebels in hiding that will come back is the cancer relapsing/regrowing.
Latest Answers