Why is cancer so hard to cure? Will we ever find an infallible cure?
In: 2088
Cancer is not one specific thing – it’s cells of your own body, or things that are part of your body, getting out of control because of a random mutation that occurs billions of times every year in your body. If the mutation gets detected, the body destroys it, if it doesn’t, it becomes a cancer and your body cannot “see” the problem.
A cancer is just cells multiplying out of control where normally they’d do it a few times and then stop themselves. That results in tumours that are large masses of those cells replicating over and over and over again unchecked, stealing your body’s nutrients, making incursions of other parts of your body, bulking up and putting pressure on and squeezing out and hindering the normally-functioning parts of your body.
Any cell in your body can become cancerous at any time. And though we know of things that exposure to can make cancer far more likely (smoking, radiation, pollution, diet, etc.), there is nothing that “stops” cancer from happening. That’s why newborns can have cancer, why kids can die of leukaemia (blood cancer), etc. why you can go your whole life without a single hint of it and then get a deadly fatal case of it that’s absolutely untreatable without warning.
Cancer isn’t just one thing – it’s a cell NOT dying but instead replicating endlessly. Your own cells. Blood cells, brain cells, cells of the major organs, skin cells, bone cells, just about any part of you. The body can’t fight it because it’s *YOU* and to all intents and appearances the cancer looks like your body, to your own immune system.
And our treatments are thus extremely primitive… often involving cutting, burning, poisoning, radiating or otherwise physically destroying the cancerous sections and hoping we don’t accidentally hit anything important along the way and that we get EVERY cell involved (because the cell that goes cancerous makes thousands of cells that are also cancerous, which make thousands of cells that are also cancerous… and so on, and it can spread throughout your body). Chemotherapy is poisoning you to kill the cancer. Radiotherapy is irradiating you to kill the cancer. Surgery is just cutting what we can see of the cancer out while leaving you with enough to live (you hope!), with scalpels and lasers and whatever else we can use.
But the cancer is part of you, and growing inside you and wraps itself in and through and around your organs, your blood vessels, anywhere that it can grow because that’s all it is… massive, uncontrolled, cell growth. It gets into every piece of the nearby tissue and still keeps growing. So all of the above treatments hurt YOU just as much. We often have to kill off your entire immune system, or cut out large portions of otherwise healthy organ (just to be on the safe side of getting it all), or even remove entire organs.
Cancer is a failure of the human body, it’s almost an inevitable consequence of just living in all beings. If you never die of anything else, you will eventually die of cancer, because that’s just your own cells hitting a stray mutation and then growing forever inside you. Historically, cases were so rare because we never really lived long enough and died of far worse things before the cancers could spread or grow far enough to kill us, but for as long as there have been cells, there have been cancers. All living things can get such cancers, though some are better at resisting/detecting/removing them themselves, but there are SO MANY types of cell, which means so many types of cancer, in every location of your body, that there’s no one safe blanket treatment for them all.
You’re fighting cancer now. Your body is killing off cancerous cells that it detects all day long. We try to use that army of your immune system to help fight cancer, but we just don’t understand enough about how to do so without damaging you in the process. If you tell it to attack a skin cancer cell and get it wrong, it will attack ALL your skin cells – and your body will kill you trying to kill off the foreign invader that it detects: Your own skin. And so on.
Cancer isn’t a “disease” in that sense, you don’t catch it, it’s just your own body slowly destroying itself through a simple cell replication error, which can be caused by MILLIONS of things, not least just pure random luck.
It’s like an inherent time limit on any living being that, after a certain period of time, you WILL get a cancer that will kill you. It’s inevitable. And our treatments are primitive and often come too late to do very much about it.
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