There is no known cure for cancer currently, how then do we have people that beat cancer and often become cancer -free?
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There is no known cure for cancer currently, how then do we have people that beat cancer and often become cancer -free?
Just because there’s no known sure cure doesn’t mean there are no treatments for cancer. After all there are no out and out cures for the vast majority of diseases that exist, only treatments to help your immune system fight it off or to slow the growth so your immune system can catch up. Cancer is even trickier because it’s not something from outside your body that we can attack it’s literally your own body cells gone rogue because something inside them broke. Anything we could give that would kill the cancer cells would kill your normal cells to and you need those to stay alive.
Some people beat cancer because it is detected early enough that we can cut it out before it gets anywhere important then heal over time. Others because we can hit it with radiation until the cancer cells get so broken they can’t reproduce which is the thing that makes them dangerous. Some it’s because the immune system manages to get the upper hand because of one of the former two treatments and kill off the cancer cells. Sometimes it is even sheer old fashioned luck where something inside the cancer gets copied wrong taking away its ability to spread forcing it into remission.
There are cures for some types of cancer.
Cancer is not just a single disease but it’s actually a group of diseases which involve abnormal cell growth and have the ability to invade other parts of the body. Abnormal cell growth is usually caused by mutations of some genes. Those mutations might disrupt normal cell growth, cell cycle, cell signaling, cell death, etc. and might lead to cancer.
But our genetic materials go through mutations all the time and most mutations are not dangerous. Even if some mutated cells managed to avoid senescence, our body has mechanisms to deal with them. It’s just that sometimes, our body fails.
And still, that’s the first few parts of the development of cancer. Now that those mutants have gained the ability to grow infinitely and avoid programmed cell death, they have to create new blood vessels around them. And after that, they need to gain the ability to invade other parts of the body. If they can’t then they would be classified as benign or otherwise you would have cancer. Keep in mind that your body is trying to fight those mutants all the time so you have to be really unlucky to have cancer.
But because modern medicine has studied these mechanisms quite a lot, we know how to deal with many types of cancer. Excisions are usually unsuccessful because if we left out a single cell of cancer, it would grow back again and if it has metastasized, then it would be more complicated to deal with. Treatments usually target specific steps of development of cancer such as preventing them from forming blood vessels or using antimetabolites to disrupt abnormal cell growth (this can also affect normal cells with high turnover rate such as hair cells).
Some people respond really well to those treatments and many of them managed to “beat” cancer. Many don’t and have to move on to the next treatment. Even if someone really got rid of it, there’s a big chance they will develop another cancer somewhere in their body or will stay sickly for the rest of their life. But many people completely recovered and became perfectly healthy so it depends.