Why Is There No Sure Cure For Cancer?
The labs working on a cure for cancer use mice as their guinea pigs. Apparently the doctors have the ability to induce cancer, of any selected type, in the furry creatures. If they know the causes, why not the cures? Or is it just that cancer fund raising charities are so lucrative?
We know there are things that cause genetic mutations. Radiation, asbestos, chemical agents… we’ve discovered these things sort of by accident. So, to cause cancer in a rodent we know we just have to expose them to these cancer-causing agents.
What we don’t know is how to fix a mutation. The cure to cancer hasn’t risen up accidentally from the environment in the same way the causes have.
I assure you, having participated in the research end of oncology, that there is no money-based conspiracy to prevent releasing a cure for cancer. It just isn’t true. The conspiracy theorists would be better off going back to Area 51 and concentrating on the alien invasion. It’s more likely than the fact that our government has hidden the cure for cancer.
There’s no guaranteed cure for any cancer.
Cancer, as you say, is hundreds of diseases, not just one. The difficulty in finding a ‘cure for cancer’ is that different cancers are caused by different things, so no one strategy can prevent them, and different cancers respond to different treatments so no one treatment can cure them all – there isn’t a single magic bullet cure for all cancers and there never will be.
Quite a few cancers can be cured these days though. Cancer Research UK says that 7 out of 10 children are cured of cancer. Testicular cancer, Hodgkin’s disease, and many cases of leukaemia can all be cured in adults with chemotherapy, most skin cancers are cured with surgery, and many cases of thyroid cancer and cancer of the larynx are cured with radiotherapy.
Many other types of cancer are also cured if they are found early enough – 75% of breast cancers found at stage one for example. There is still a long way to go, especially with some of the commonest.
There’ll never be a Eureka! moment when someone discovers a substance or procedure that will reverse all cancers. But there will continue to be steady advances – reversing some types of cancer, finding improved treatments for others.
This research is underfunded though and, far from being lucrative, all the money raised by cancer charities is a drop in the ocean of what’s needed.
And the causes of cancer are not yet known
because they have yet to isolate a single cause for cancer… never mind exploring all the treatment options, creating and testing new ones … sending them to clinical trials and then mass producing them for the market…
it sucks but it takes time.