Prevent or cure cancer

Understanding
Some cancers can kill humans and animals. These cancers are called malignant. Cancer is an uncontrolled growth of tissue that interferes with the functioning of the internal organs of an organism. Fundamentally, cancer is caused by chance mutations in the genes of a cell. If those mutations lead to a cell with unrestricted growth behaviour then that cell will keep dividing from then onwards and become a tumour.

Chemotherapy kills everything in the body unselectively. It's a potent poison. Cancerous cells respire quickly and absorb this poison quickly but so do other quickly respiring cells in the body including all of the lining of your stomach, your intestines, your liver, your kidneys, your bowels. This poison kills all of the cells that absorb a sufficient dosage of it, which means every cell in the body would be threatened because the blood circulation would carry that poison around everywhere in your body. If this poisoning treatment persists it leads to multiple organ failure. The survival rate from cancer is better if you have surgery and do not use any toxic chemicals that would weaken you and slow down your recovery or stop or reverse any natural healing your body is still managing to maintain in spite of being poisoned. Failure of any one of the vital organs previously mentioned above would kill you faster than any cancer ever could (which kills you by growing). Poisons in general kill you faster than cancer, but potent poisons are worse. There is no evidence that chemotherapy can successfully treat any cancer. Drug companies make doctors push chemotherapy to patients that are diagnosed with cancer. In a survey of over 60 doctors who worked with cancer, 75% said they would not do chemotherapy if they developed cancer. The success rate of curing cancer has remained unchanged between 1950 and 2001 (see the first link at the bottom of this page for the source of this).

Cancers can also spread from one part of the body to another. They can only do this if their cells have a mutation that makes them softer and more pliable. This allows them to slip through smaller gaps and escape from one tissue region into the bloodstream and then lodge themselves into another region of tissue within the body. Once they are in a new region of tissue they could then form a new tumour growth there. When the cell has developed the ability to spread by becoming softer the cell is said to have metastisised or that it is metastatic. The process of becoming metastatic is called metastasis.

When a tumour is surgically removed it's not statistically likely that all of the cancerous cells have been removed. A new tumour can grow in the remaining tissue from the cancerous cells that have been left behind.

Cancers should not be labelled only according to their location in the body or the type of cell that has been mutated. Cancers can best be understood and treated by classifying them according to the genetic and physical characteristics of the mutated cells.

The characteristics that make a cell cancerous are not always caused by the same mutations in the same genes (their genotypes). They can be caused by multiple mutations that work together in just the right way to create the superficial characteristics of being cancerous. These superficial characterisics are called phenotypes. The two most important phenotypes to consider are uncontrolled growth and metastasis but each of these effects is determined by a group of sub-characteristics. Uncontrolled growth is aided by the following main mechanisms, namely, promoting the growth of extra blood vessels to feed the tumour with more nutrients, deactivating the programmed cell death aspect of its life cycle that occurs after a certain number of cell divisions have occured (via telomere length), render genetic repair mechanisms ineffective, locally generate its own growth hormones and become immune to the growth inhibitor chemicals and proteins of the body.

This means that curing cancer will involve finding solutions to each of these sub-problems.

Via cell characteristics

 * 1) Find a treatment that only affects cells that have the characteristics of a cancerous cell.
 * 2) Use that against those cells to selectively kill only the cancerous cells.

Via cell position

 * 1) Determine the location of a cancerous growth.
 * 2) Accurately target that growth with a treatment such as surgery, radiotherapy or focussed ultrasound therapy.

Quiz
Quiz - Prevent or cure cancer

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