Why is cancer so hard to cure? Will we ever find an infallible cure?
In: 2088
We can easily get rid of cancer, the hard part is getting rid of it without getting rid of the person so to speak.
Curing cancer is just like curing infections: some cells growing where they shouldn’t and they interfere with the body. You can’t find something to cure them all, because they are all different. They affect different parts of the body, grow at different speeds, respond to different medicines, have different impacts on the body.
Cancer’s even nastier, though. The body is slow to decide it’s not supposed to be there. It has ways of identifying bacteria and viruses, but cancer’s made up of your own cells, and it often doesn’t recognize that something’s gone wrong until the cancer has really gotten bad. Since cancer’s made of your own cells, it’s also true that things that kill cancer often kill your healthy cells too, which means cancer treatment can make you very sick.
From my understanding the most basic reason is because cancer isn’t some invading virus or bacteria that isn’t part of your body and can be easily targeted and eradicated with medication that can see a clear difference between you and the illness.
Cancer is your own body accidentally killing itself by replicating faulty cells. It’s why chemotherapy is so unpleasant – it destroys the cancer cells as well as healthy cells along with them. The nuclear option.
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.
A few reasons.
First off, “Cancer” isn’t just a single disease. It’s a category of diseases that all arise from cell machinery that malfunctions and causes the cells to divide out of control.
There are a LOT of different causes for that kind of malfunction, so coming up with any kind of one-size-fits-all preventive treatment is effectively impossible.
It can crop up in lots of different types and different parts of the body. Again, one kind of cancer can be like a completely different disease compared to another.
By and large, trying to come up with a panacea that works on an entire class of diseases is a fool’s errand. It makes much better sense to come up with targeted treatments and then use the one that’s the most effective for a given type of cancer. It’s like how we have to use different antibiotics for different kinds of bacteria – antibiotics in general have been a godsend for humanity, but some classes of antibiotic just wouldn’t work on the wrong kind of bacteria.
On the plus side, there’s some really encouraging work going on with gene therapy and immunotherapy.
Your body is detecting and destroying mutated cells all the time, but the groups of cells we think of as “cancer” have figured out how to do things better than the normal cells around them. They’re stealing more food or making their own blood supply or they’re able to move through tissue and invade other areas where they’re not supposed to be. They’re already harder to get rid of and better at staying alive than your normal cells by the time they become a problem.
Most of our treatments for cancer target cells that grow fast, but you have a lot of cells that grow fast in your body that aren’t cancer. This is why chemo makes you lose your hair, or causes nausea or sores in your mouth (mucosal linings are fast growing too). As others have mentioned, cancer cells “look like you” in a lot of ways because they come from your cells, so your immune system has a hard time recognizing them and fighting them off. Some of the most promising upcoming treatments are trying to “teach” your immune system how to fight back more effectively.
The question of whether or not we will find a “cure” for cancer is a little misleading because it’s not really one disease. The early process is similar in that a cell mutates and then out-competes those around it, causing damage that is ultimately too much for your body to deal with. But a lung cancer is very different from a stomach cancer is very different from a lymphoma in terms of the problems they cause and the damage they do. And people respond very differently to our currently available treatments. Some people tolerate chemo and radiation without too much difficulty while others have side effects that are so bad that they can’t continue the treatment.
I think the best case scenario is that one day we will find treatments that are so good at detecting and targeting cancer cells that we will be able to kill the dangerous cells without hurting the rest of you. Cancer will never stop happening, and if you live long enough, it’ll pop up again and again, but it’ll be like getting rid of weeds in an otherwise healthy garden.
Cancer is not a single disease. It is a variety of diseases affecting different parts of the body, where the common element is cells multiplying out of control, taking up space and resources, and causing problems for healthy cells.
A cure that would affect one cancer is not necessarily going to affect another.
First of all, “cancer” isn’t one disease. It’s a blanket term for a bunch of disorders characterized by the uncontrolled division of abnormal cells. There are 2 main types of lung cancer (and 5 subtypes), 5-6 main types of breast cancer, 3 main types of skin cancer (and several less common ones). “Cancer” is hard to cure, in part, because each cancer might have a totally different cure.
Individual cancerous conditions are hard to cure for a couple of reasons. Cancer is not comprised of foreign cells/material like a virus or bacteria. Cancer is your own body’s abnormal cells multiplying out of control. This presents 2 problems. First, your immune system doesn’t have as many tools to fight cancer as it does to fight infection. Second, many treatments that kill cancer also kill the good cells. Chemo and radiation, in their most basic forms, kill everything. In fact, many of the advancements we’ve made in cancer treatment research all about targeting ONLY the bad cells. Killing is easy (go stand next to a pile of plutonium); not harming the vital stuff is hard.
“Cancer” is not one thing, it’s a whole ass genre. It’s like saying “why can’t we cure diseases” – we can, sometimes for some of them.
Cancer is not a virus , or a bacteria. It’s your own body mutating and growing out of control.
It can be caused by those things, but the idea of “curing” cancer is like “curing” your skin from growing anymore. Just imagine you’d like one foot, and only one foot, to stop growing when you’re a teenager.
How would you go about that? You’d have to start messing with your DNA, probably cause a bunch of cellular damage with chemicals, or heck, we could cut the foot off and that’d stop it for sure!
That’s the same approach as to cancer. It’s a living part of you, just growing out of control. There isn’t going to be a “cure” as much as there will be a “method to removing mutated cells from healthy cells reliably.”
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