It is often said that there is no cure for cancer, and if a cure was ever found it would be a huge boon to mankind (and some say pharma companies have the cure but suppress it because there’s too much money to be made in treatment*)
But I personally know (and have heard countless stories of others) who had cancer, and through some combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy no longer have cancer. Why is this not considered a “cure”? I certainly understand the continued search for a “pharmaceutical cure” (i.e. take a pill and the cancers goes away) because surgery, radiation and chemo all have undesirable side effects, but is it true that cancer has (as yet) no cure?
*not trying to argue this point, just putting it out there as evidence that there is no cure currently available.
It depends on the cancer and how soon it’s detected. Some are near 100%, others( such as pancreatic) are an almost certain death sentence by the time they’re found.
Prostate cancer is famous for being undetected(not always) until the person dies of other causes.
The current treatments are a case of the cure is almost as bad as the disease and the main point is to kill the cancer without killing the patient.
What is desired is to find what all cancers have in common(if that’s even true) and use that as the focus of treatment.
Many cancer are cured just through surgical removal (for instance skin cancers, and a smaller but still significant percentage of internal/solid organ malignancies (i.e. breast and colon).
Many are cured through a combination of surgery and the other modalities you mentioned. Others (like pancreatic cancer and malignant brain gliomas) are curable much more rarely and have low survival rates. Advances are being made, but it’s a slow difficult grind.
Physicians are conservative by nature and tend not to blare out “cured!”, because sometimes cancers can recur many years later. But after 5, 10 or more years lots of these patients are for practical purposes cured of their cancers.
I know the OP is aware of this, but researchers affiliated with drug companies (and their superiors) know that if and when they come up with major breakthroughs against one or more cancers, great fame and fortune will be theirs, so there are major incentives on that basis alone for coming up with “a care for cancer”. All of these people are susceptible to cancer as well (not to mention their families, relations and friends), so that’s another enormous incentive not to “suppress” cures.
One would have to be a complete paranoid dingbat to believe that there is a monstrous conspiracy involving drug companies, researchers, physicians and others to suppress cancer cures for money. Unfortunately, there are quite a few such dingbats.
Some cancers can sometimes be cured. But there is no treatment, or combination of treatments, that can always cure all cancers, or even usually cure most cancers. Nor, probably, will there ever be: Progress in the war against cancer is made by increasing the number of cancers that can sometimes be cured, and by increasing the reliability of those sometimes-cures.
It can also be difficult to impossible to distinguish remission from cure. IANAMD so I don’t know the standard time-lines but I do know that some cancers are not considered cured until the person has had no evident cancer for some number of years.
The treatment for my large B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma would not have worked against melanoma, breast cancer, bone cancer, or even other forms of lymphoma. It was a highly specialized chemotherapy cocktail combined with monoclonal antibody treatments (basically injecting me with blood components from a rodent that was immune to my particular form of cancer).
The treatment for the prostate cancer was simply to remove it.
Even today, ten years later, nobody knows whether the lymphoma will come back. Heck, they don’t know how I got it in the first place! It’s really hard to apply the word “cured” there since there’s so much unknown.
We’re pretty sure the prostate cancer won’t come back, because I don’t have a prostate anymore
Wow very interesting. It’s amazing to hear about all the novel treatments for each type of cancer that there can be. Most people are familiar with the chemo, radiation, and “cut it right out of your body” approaches, but I know I’ve never heard of injecting mouse blood (I know it’s not quite that simple)
Chronos’ point bears repeating. When most people think of “cure”, they’re defining it as a pill that will completely eradicate all cancer cells from a cancer patient, forever. That isn’t how scientists define a cure.
Some specialized treatments have up to >95% success rates like runner pat said. What happens sometimes is that there are still mutant cells that aren’t killed outright and become “hardier” and resistant to treatment. If those can grow, the cancer will come back with a nastier adaptation, somewhat comparable to a bacteria strain with antibiotic resistance.
Cancer is a very human disease because the same cells that make “us” can sometimes mutate to make cancer. Separating us from cancer takes either a macro approach (like surgery and radiation), a molecular/genetic approach (like drugs), or an immunotherapeutic approach (in which the body’s own immune system can be trained to target cancer cells, e.g., genetically engineered stem cells).
I disagree somewhat with runner pat regarding the cure is as bad as the disease. That was certainly true with early chemotherapy treatments but we’re getting better at making treatments more tolerable for a larger numbers of cancer sites. For patients with early stage disease, treatments are less intense than those for patients with systemic or metastatic disease.
I think its just semantics. You don’t cure a splinter, you remove it. You can’t cure alcoholism, but you can make a person stop drinking. I believe the process of metastasization is what is incurable about cancer, but they can keep removing tumors indefinitely as long as the person survives the operations.
Don’t be so sure: My dad died of prostate cancer some years after his prostate was removed. Apparently it had already metastasized, and so even after the bulk of it was removed, there were still prostate-derived cancer cells floating around in his body. If you’ve gone for years with a PSA level of 0, then the signs are pretty good, but just having the gland itself removed is no guarantee.
Metastasis is the really awful and tough-to-treat part. My sister-in-law recently died of cancer of the salivary glands. (Due to smoking, we suspect.) Her type was super-rare and they ended up playing whack-a-mole as it popped up around her body a year or few between cases. She had cancer in her breasts twice (radiation/chemo the first time, finished off with double mastectomy the second). She had a tumor pop up in her brain. Around her kidneys. Finally ended up in her lungs.
Apparently the rarity of the particular variety and how to go about treating it was a big part of the difficulty in treating her.
I think doctors tend to be very careful about using the word “cure” when it comes to cancer, because the nature of the beast is that we can never be certain that it’s gone for good. There could be microscopic metastases all over the place that we can’t detect. IANAD, but as I understand it, once you have cancer, the best state you can hope to achieve is “as far as we can tell, there’s probably no cancer in you right now, but let’s keep an eye on it.”
My husband has been cured of kidney cancer, twice, just with surgery. He’s one of the lucky ones, usually kidney cancer isn’t caught until it’s too late. The first instance was caught because his doctor wanted to rule out Von Hippel Lindau Syndrome (which it turns out he has a textbook case of) and since they he’s been monitored regularly. The second instance was caught in January 2012, and he had a partial nephrectomy. He has about 3/5 of a kidney left, and doesn’t need dialysis. Hopefully he won’t get it again, because if he does, it’s dialysis time.
Problem is with the use of the word “cure”. Cure in popular usage implies a permanent state of solution.
The state of modern oncology in many cancers involves a notion of stability, rather than a sense of “we’re not worrying about any cancer in your future.”
The issue of “cure proper” in cancer is the continuing sense that cancer can either independently recur, or that occult mets can present as “new” cancer.