Intuitively, I feel that the excitement over immuno-therapy (using your own immune system to kill cancer cells) could be immature. After all, tumor cells are the mutation of your own body cells, and your immune system was not established to fight your own cell. We need revolutionary thinking in cancer prevention and treatment, sometimes I feel, we should put this task into the hands of engineers, physicists, etc, we need really "out-of-the-box" thinking - somebody who has not been conditioned by the tradition of medical field.
Pretty much, once the cancer is diagnosed, it is really like "horse has already left the barn" billions of dollars are being spent each year to chase this horse, yet it always seems to out-run, out-smart the medical staff. A lot of progress has been made for early diagnosis - this has created a big impression that great advancement has been made in treating cancer (higher 5-year survival rate, say). The truth could be just half the truth - it could be that tumors are found 2-5 years earlier, which makes the survival rate look longer.
MoatCity 发表评论于
Thanks! Will be waiting for the expansion of your thread. What has puzzled me a lot is that after conventional treatment (surgery, chemo, radiation), some tumor cells would go into hiding for years (5 to 10 normally for breast cancer), then when patients begin celebrating 10 years of "cancer-free", mets would appear, it would normally be in the brain, lung, or bone, etc. It rarely comes back to the original site (like breast). I am really interested in what are happening in those years? Tumor cells are slowly gaining strength for new breakthrough? Body's immune system is worn out? Are those tumor cells embedded in those organs (brain, bone, etc) since the beginning, or they migrated from the primary site? What would be the migration pattern if there is a way to trace the tumor cells?
Very important topic, hope author can elaborate on the following aspects: the spread of tumor which ultimately kills a person, while a tumor cell originated in one organ would grow in another organ without being recognized; how to understand remission and recurrence? How, after many years of remission, tumor cells decided to grow again? Where are the tumor cells hiding over the years & what prompted them to grow? The earlier and earlier onsets of tumor cases, especially breast cancer? Why people living in poverty has few cancer cases? Why cancer rate has skyrocketed in China in the last 30 years?
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