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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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.
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