Maybe I’m just not exposed enough but I’ve never heard of someone who, let’s say, is suffering from breast cancer and throat cancer at the same time. Or lung cancer and testicular cancer at the same time. Why is that?
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Is it rare, I don’t know but many get secondary blood or bone cancer. Don’t know the stats though.
The chance to get cancer is rare. So that’s the main reason.
Speaking of exposed, just this week I had a patient with colon and breast cancer, so it definitely happens.
It’s less likely to occur in people who have access to regular medical care. When it does happen it’s most likely to be a secondary invasion of the first cancer. I’ve personally been witness to someone who started off with late stage lung cancer that went to bone marrow. Fucking brutal. Fortunately cancer, despite being common in media, is still statically rare in a deadly form. We’re diagnosing and treating at way earlier stages now days which makes it seem much more rampant.
I’m married to one of those statistical anomalies. Found Stage 3 tumor during routine colonoscopy. That tyoe of cancer typically spreads to the liver and/or lungs so they ran a full body scan. That revealed a separate tumor in the left lung. A short biopsy later confirmed it was unrelated limited SCLC.
The immune system is really good at hunting down cancer. A cancer cell is just one growing faster than it should and ignoring everything telling it to stop. It starts these processes through mutation.
The immune system works by identifying self and then destroying everything not-self. The mutations that occur in a cell usually disrupt the self markers on it and so get destroyed by the immune system. If this didn’t happen on average you would develop one tumor per week of your life. For you to develop cancer it has to be close enough to you for your immune system to identify it as self while still growing faster than normal and ignoring signals saying stop growing.
It’s much more likely that a mutation prone cell that’s already fulfilled the requirements for cancer to grow in such a way it’s moved through your blood stream to random places than it is for another cell to also become cancerous.
As an aside, spontaneous cancer clearance is from the immune system finally recognising it’s not right and waging war against it.
Didn’t cyclist Lance Armani have multiple cancers simultaneously?
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