We often see news in the media with headlines such as “the great discovery of the medical world”, “the cure for cancer has finally been found” etc. These news have adorned the pages of another newspaper almost every week for decades and are not mentioned again, for some reason.
If there was such a big improvement in the treatment of cancer, would it be something that would get lost in the tabloids of these newspapers? If there is no cure for cancer, why are these news? How do we separate it from this news when there is a really big development on this issue?
First of all, it is necessary to understand this: There is not a single disease that we can call cancer.
There are hundreds of different types of cell mutations that can have devastating effects on the organism. We can explain the functioning of the cells in our body simply as follows: Cells have a system that allows them to kill themselves when necessary. Thus, if there is a faulty condition in that cell, it is prevented from multiplying further by division.
However, this system does not always work perfectly. When cells do not respond to this command to die, faulty cells can multiply unceasingly. The mutated cells that multiply continue to demand resources such as nutrients from the body and take up space, just like other cells. Therefore, they compress the area.
When mutated cells appear, some cells in the immune system can go and kill these cells. But sometimes this system doesn’t work either. In this case, outside interventions may be required. At this stage, chemotherapy, which is the method used in cancer treatment, comes into play.
Chemotherapy does not actually cure cancer, it aims to kill cancerous cells. But in order to do this, it kills all the cells in that area.
This situation can be fatal for the whole organism. Because while unwanted cancerous cells are killed, a large number of cells necessary for the body’s defense mechanism can be lost.
New methods are being developed that can reduce the secondary damage caused by chemotherapy. But the thing we need to remember again is this: There is no single disease called cancer. Therefore, the treatment is also very different. For example, some areas of our body are much easier to access and intervene, while others can only be reached through blood flow. Some are even harder to reach.
There can be really significant advances in the treatment of certain types of cancer, enough to change the death rate.
However, these do not mean that “the cure for cancer has been found”. Indeed, some of the advances in this area can suddenly be so great that they increase survival from a particular type of cancer by 20% or more.
However, this is not always the case. We can say that most developments we see in the news make a 1-2% difference.
For patients who only have the types of cancer in which they develop, these developments can be truly life-changing, meaning they can survive.
These great developments are limited to some types of cancer, and these are mostly blood cancers. For example, we can say that very promising developments are on the way for solid tumors as well.
There are indeed great advances in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer. However, the way to go is much more than this, and we are still far from the point where we can call it a “cure for cancer”.
Mainstream journalism tends to exaggerate these new developments and technologies all over the world.
Especially with internet journalism, these headlines aiming to arouse interest for the news to get clicks can often be extremely misleading about the content of the news.
If a headline was made in the media saying “Field experiments on cancer type x have been going quite successfully for months”, it probably won’t get the same popularity. Even institutions that do journalism in a responsible and ethical manner sometimes put too much emotion and exaggeration on these news stories.
Is this exaggeration just because of the media? No. Sometimes, researchers want their results to be oversized in order to get more funding, and they promote it in this way.
Many researchers exaggerate their findings to get more reads and clicks on their paper. The reason for this exaggeration may not always be the researcher himself.
The way in which grants are given to such scientific researches and how these processes are carried out can vary greatly from country to country. Actors who play a role in the process for receiving these grants, but who are not scientists, may prefer to present the research in a more superficial and exaggerated way, and this is how the news spreads.
There will probably never be a universal and universally applicable “cure for cancer”.
When we think about cancer treatment, we need to understand that there will not be a magical substance that will cure everything, like the vaccines that were found in some diseases at the time. There are many complex procedures that take a long time to evaluate the pros and cons.
For this reason, it will probably not be possible for us to see a miracle solution that works for everyone one day. Because each organism can react differently to treatments; Each treatment may produce different results depending on the patient and the way the treatment is administered.
Today, cancer is not a completely hopeless disease, the treatments are getting easier every day.
At the point we have reached today, there are many types of drugs that can eliminate the chemotherapy requirements for certain types of cancer at different stages of cancer. Cancer survival rates have increased dramatically over the decades and continue to rise with new developments.
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