Why is cancer so hard to cure? Will we ever find an infallible cure?
In: 2088
Cancer is not a single thing, it is a group of diseases where your own cell has abnormal and uncontrolled growth. There are differences depending on what cell types start as in your body.
It is hard to threat because it is your own cells that duplicate in an extreme rate. Your immune system will not in general attack it because it can see it is your own cells. If they would know the cells needed to be killed they could manage that, this is why cancer does not spread between people, your body identifies cells from another body as foreign and attack it regardless if they are cancerous or not.
This is why organ translation can be problematic too, there is immunosuppressant drugs to stop the immune system from attacking foreign cells. Cancer transmitted via transplants are possible but extremely rare.
Any medical intervention needs to kill the cancer cells but not kill normal cells or at least kill them at a lower rate. Because there is minimal difference between what you need to keep alive and what to kill it is very hard to do.
Killion cancer cells are not hard, the hard part is to do it in a host without killing the cells they need to survive.
If you compare to bacterial or viral infections they are in many ways different from our cells and medicine can target the difference.
Treatments like Chemotherapy exploit that they decided more often and cells target cells that divide. It results in less killing of cells you like to keep.
Radiation targets an area of the body and kills cells that are there. The problem cancer cell can spread out in the body and the radiation kills cells you what to keep alive. If the tumor is too close to something you need to stay alive just hitting the tumor can be impossible.
Surgery has the same problem as radiation, you can remove a large tumor but it can be impossible to remove enough around it to make sure all cancer cell is gone without killing the patient. Cancer cells can also migrate.
So cancer is a group of diseases where your own cells grow in an uncontrolled rate. It is because it is your cells threatening it is hard without killing the cells you need to survive.
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