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
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.
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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.
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