Are you feared of cancer? Everyone fears of it because we haven’t yet developed medicines that can cure or treat cancer successfully. However patients are saved using a combination of treatments that include surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. But still these are not enough to remove cancer cells entirely from the body. When you ask your doctor about the survival rate, he will never tell you 100 percent because they are not sure whether the cancer cells are removed entirely from the body. A single cancer cell is capable to develop tumor in the body, if it is left untreated. As far as I know, we haven’t yet developed such technology that can find the existence of remaining cancer cells in the body after the treatment is completed. That’s why patients are given radiotherapy after surgery to kill remaining cells. I know this process because my father has died of cancer and the same process was applied, but we couldn’t save his life.
Millions of deaths are happening due to cancer annually. Even though today doctors are capable to save more people than before, it is not a perfect solution to prevent cancer. Recently Immunotherapy has become popular treatment and is being used to fight cancer cells. This therapy helps patient’s own immune system to kill cancer cells and it is preferred to use in cancer treatment instead of radiotherapy or chemotherapy.
Why is it hard to find a cure for cancer?
This question lies in everyone’s mind. To find treatment for cancer is really very tough because cancer doesn’t refer to only one disease. Cancer denotes more than 100 types of diseases that cause unusual cell growth in the patient. The nature of individual tumor may differ from another or same tumor in different organs in the same body may not respond to the same treatment given to another one. So it is very difficult to understand its nature.
Cancer is highly unpredictable and uncertain disease, because it can move one organ to another very quickly and can carry on mutation process continuously.
“Cancer cells are very adaptive, especially when the cancer is at an advanced stage,” says Olsen.
Difficult to define cancer by location in body
This makes cancer more complex for doctors. According to them, it is very tough to define cancer disease by location.
For example, a lung cancer tumour in one patient may more closely resemble throat cancer in someone else, than another case of the same type of cancer.
This means two cancer tumors found in two different organs in two different patients can have same features. This creates difficulties for oncologists to diagnose the disease. Moreover, same types of tumor found in two different bodies may require separate treatments.
It is found that the reasons which cause cancer development may depend on individual DNA. So it may differ from person to person.
“If we study 10,000 people who’ve been exposed to some substances that we know are carcinogenic, then perhaps just ten, five, or one per cent of those will develop cancer. Why? I think it’s down to the interaction between you genetic composition and external influences,” says Olsen.
There are more articles that have detail explanation about cancer disease. I would like to refer this article https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/why-havent-we-cured-cancer-yet/ written by Dr. David Gorski, MD, PhD, FACS, a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute.
Source:
http://sciencenordic.com/scientists-we-will-never-find-cure-cancer
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-so-hard-to-cure-cancer