Cancer

the facts; the truth; the real, genuine information

      In practice, in a particular case, this is a matter for specialist doctors and depends on the location and nature of the cancer, resources available (including financial) and, by no means least, the wishes of the patient. From first principles, it seems that only four kinds of active treatment can possibly exist:
1] Remove the cancer by surgery.
2] Kill the rogue cells by means of some external treatment or medication.
3] Restore cellular control mechanisms.
4] Help the body to destroy or restrain the rogue cells, by its own methods.
Past medical treatments have been almost entirely [1] and [2]. The first often fails because in fact the operation does not remove all the rogue cells and sooner or later the residue begins to grow again, either at the original place or at a distant location where they were already secretly established. The second fails because the treatments do not have sufficient selectivity for only cancer cells. Most chemotherapy and radiotherapy methods have the property that they attack cells because they are growing, irrespective of whether cancerous or not, so the dose must be only what normal growing cells will bear.      

      Health requires some normal cells to continue growing throughout life and the patient suffers when this function is damaged; or may die, as happened after overdoses of radiation at Hiroshima or as in the recent murder in London of the Russion ex-KGB man, Litvinenko. Making clever use of this, a few leukaemias are treated by destroying all the rogue and normal blood-forming cells using doses of radiation which would ordinarily be fatal, and then replacing the blood-forming cells with healthy ones by a bone-marrow transplant from another person.

            In respect of type [4], such bodily mechanisms certainly operate quietly all the time, preventing most cancers ever happening, restraining others so that a lot of 'cancers' don’t need treatment, and contributing to ‘cures’ that are thought to be due to treatments under 1, 2 or 3. There is no solid proof of success for active treatment by this means alone.
           Recently treatments of type [3] have been introduced in which a drug partially restores a damaged control mechanism. This obviously gives huge hope for the future but at present helps only a very few patients in whom we happen to know the details of a critically-important and badly damaged system which also happens to be the one broken in this particular case You cannot ‘repair’ a control mechanism that isn’t damaged. If it ain’t broke, there’s nothing to fix.
            Since all the cells of a cancer are descended from one originator they must all share a common set of the alterations that turned them into rogue cells. If it were possible to improve selectivity so that drugs recognised that set of changes and therefore attacked only cancer cells and no other growing cells, treatments of class [2] would be much more likely to succeed. It seems that such improvement in selectivity can be achieved, differently for each individual case.