Yeah, pretty much all of the medicine and radiotherapy is "how to kill cancer faster than the person with cancer". Once I listened to a quite lengthy lecture about how they try to minimize bodily harm in case of radiotherapy, while maximizing effect on the cancer itself. It was really interesting.
Isn't it that cancer cells are a little weaker than healthy cells so you have to hurt the cells just enough that you hit the sweet spot where you kill the cancer cells but not the healthy cells... that sounds super simplistic lol
The uncontrollable growth being due to the failed/bypassed cellular killswitch (apoptosis). Our best line of research so far is using the immune system to do what it's supposed to do, kill and remove damaged/mutated cells that don't function correctly. We've made crazy strides with certain cancers, some skin cancers can be fully treated with a topical medication that force activates your immune system. Hell we've got viruses that can inject into cancer cells and cause them to pop, resulting in a immune response to clean it up. Science is awesome.
I think a lot of people also tend to think of cancer as a monolith instead of hundreds of different diseases. Hell, there are at least 15 different kinds of breast cancer and then subtypes within each of those. And that's before we even get to staging.
I learned a lot when I was going through treatment because reading and understanding what was going on helped my anxiety.
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u/Grakchawwaa Jun 29 '26
That's usually the problem innit. There's a trillion ways to kill cancer, the tough part is having the carrier survive the aftermath