Why is it taking so long time find a cure, or even an effective treatment that doesn’t destroy your body
it’s literally destroying my family person by person, this is half question and half venting.
In: Biology
Cancer is not a disease, it’s a symptom – like fever.
You can’t “cure fever” because new diseases can always pop up that cause fever in a new way.
There isn’t going to be a “cure for cancer”, because there could always be a new form of cancer pop up, perhaps triggered by a new environmental factor.
Many diseases, like diabetes, also cannot be “cured”. We can vaccinate to prevent them, and even some cancers can be prevented this way, but solutions have to be worked out on a disease-by-disease basis.
Cancers are defined by:
1- cell type
2- location
3- if metastasis or local invasion has occurred
4- other specifications that are beyond the scope of ELI5
So a diagnosis of cancer looks like: small cell carcinoma of the left lower lung with metastasis. And that’s a completely different disease than, lets say, vestibular neuroma of the left VIII cranial nerve.
They have about as much in common as AIDS does with coronavirus. Yes they are both viral diseases but with totally different risk factors, disease process and treatment.
So the question isn’t: what is the cure for cancer? It is, however: how do we prevent, diagnose and cure, for example, osteosarcoma? And the answer to that will be completely different for prostate cancer.
I’m so sorry you are struggling with this. It’s truly a terrible disease.
The short answer to the question is because there are so many different types of cancer. It all comes down to what DNA mutation is causing the cancer cells to grow out of control. For example sometimes the cell’s ability to check itself for errors becomes compromised and other times normal cell growth genes get a mutation that makes them overactive. There are a lot of different causes and the most effective therapy would be to target the specific cause.
So the question is how do you kill the cancer cells and not the person. A lot of therapy is just carpet bombing all highly active cells, though this often includes normally active cells and we get a lot of nasty side effects. If you know the cause there are more targeted therapies and there is a lot of research in these, but you would have to find one for each different type of cancer.
Cancer is the mutation of your own cells. You cant vaccinate your own cells without wiping them all out. Plus, our cells actually mutate every day. This is normal for the replication process to create something that is not quite right. The thing that is not normal is our body immediately identifying this and correcting it. It’s all very intricate and there is of course a lot more to it than that, but that is a good starting point.
Treating cancer in theory isnt very hard, the issue is doing it while causing minimal damage to the patient. Removing tumors without causing fatal damage can be very difficult, on top of that radiation treatment can also cause lots of damage to healthy parts of your body
Cancer is uncontrolled cell growth. It’s a thing that happens in your body due to damage to the mechanisms of cell growth. It’s not the disease, it’s the symptom.
You need to prevent that cell damage that causes uncontrolled cell growth, since the grown cells continue to carry that defect.
lots of reasons!!
money, lack of interest, other health problems…in their weakened state it is difficult to run experiments without risking the life of the individual with cancer.
also nurses don’t have the authority or the training and the few doctors working on a cure based thesis are focusing on a disease or health issue that either they themselves or someone they care about has. the technology to cure one type of mutation may exist however, focusing on that doesn’t cure any of the other types of mutation.
unfortunately the intelligence of our race believes in impossibility and that limit’s the capabilities of technological growth.
technically we didn’t cure it by the time we lost the capability to cure it and it takes a really long time to train people to do such things.
the problem with cancer is that with the exception of group radiation exposure it is typically a per individual mutation based disease and unless you can keep people from mutating then it will never truly be cured.
there’s tons of stuff that doctors are too closed minded or tunnel visioned to focus on and as our age of knowledge starts to stagnate we get farther and farther from real cures and kindof are stuck in the whole ‘hey this fake fucking pandemic really shows how stupid our medical professionals are’
the real cancer is the person next to your elbow in the computer lab.
Two reasons. Each one, by itself, would make things difficult. But together…
1) Cancer isn’t one disease – it’s a lot of them. Lung cancer, skin cancer, breast cancer, brain cancer, leukemia (aka “bone marrow cancer”), lymphoma (aka “lymph node cancer”), etc. are all technically different diseases. They are caused by different things; they behave differently; and they have different treatments. There are some treatments that work well against more than one form of cancer – in fact, many do – but they don’t always work.
2) Cancer used to be you. Cancer is what happens when some of your cells start breaking the rules about how cells cooperate, and turn into little domestic terrorists in your body – but when they’re not trying to kill you, they look more or less like the rest of your body. This is a problem because it means that many early cancer treatments were basically “Do as much damage to the host as it takes to kill the cancer, and hope the host is alive at the end” – with refinements aimed at reducing the damage to the host while still pointing enough damage at the cancer to kill it. We’re starting to be able to specifically target cancer – but it’s still too much like trying to kill domestic terrorists with your country’s air force.
Put them together, and even the same type of cancer (example: breast cancer) in different people might not respond to the same treatments: Maybe the treatment that worked well on Mary ends up causing too much damage to Judy’s body; or the treatment that worked for Judy, Mary’s cancer is immune to. We’re seeing this a lot with minorities: it turns out that there are certain genetic variations more common in some races that change how you need to treat cancers. It’s also true with sex differences: while men don’t often get breast cancer; some breast cancer chemotherapy treatments don’t work for me.
And on top of that, cancer has a lot of ways of hiding – one of the ongoing problems with cancer is that if you don’t get it ALL, it can come back. And if you used chemotherapy (basically, trying to poison the cancer), it might come back immune to those poisons; which makes it harder to treat next time. That’s part of the reason why surgery (trying to cut out all of the cancer) doesn’t always work: it’s too easy to miss just a little bit, which means it’s not dead. And like some horror movie villain: if you’re not 100% sure it’s dead, it’s going to come back.
…
Oh, and a final thing: your entire life, your body is trying to regenerate just the right amount. If you don’t make enough new cells, you probably end up dying of a dementia-related disease, or of heart failure. If you make too many, that’s cancer. Living is balancing the two – and it’s a hard balance. Each human is more likely to fall off this balance one way or another; meaning that once you know you’re on the “cancer” side of things (either by getting cancer, or by having a family history of cancer); you’re more likely to get cancer – forever… well, until you die.
For untold billions of years life used to be single cell. Big multicellular organisms, like us, only evolved recently. When that happened the new organisms kept the vast majority of their predecessors DNA code, which have been optimized for a long time for single existance. Our cells have a thin layer of control and coordination on top of a huge legacy code base built for single cell existance. When that thin layer breaks down in one or a few of our dozens of thrillions of cells, and it/they revert back to the rules of single cell existance and multiplication we get the start of a cancer.
Your cells, each time they reproduce, have checkpoints, making sure they reproduced correctly. If they don’t, they kill themselves, protecting the body from making more of those cells. Cancer is when the cell skips the checkpoint, causing unregulated cell growth. Chemotherapy and radiation treatment is like a nuclear bomb. You get rid of the cancer, but you also get rid of all the other cells in the area, so it’s extremely hard to get rid of.
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