Cancer is a vicious condition on its own. There are over 200 kinds of this nasty disease and it can affect pretty much any part of the body. This vast variety means that treatment is always going to be an issue because a treatment for one may not work on another. In the same way a cure is unlikely to be developed at any point in our lives because curing all of the various different types of cancer will be tricky too!
Another reason that cancer is such a deadly and cruel disease is that the treatments for it often involve making the patient much worse before they ever get better. If those same patients don’t get better this can mean reducing them to fatigued husks of themselves for their last days on Earth, which is why some people opt not to be treated. Of course, the earlier you catch cancer, the easier and safer it is to treat. There are some kinds which have an almost guaranteed survival rate providing they’re caught early enough in their lives.
The older you are, the more common cancer becomes. For those who contract kidney cancer over the age of 66, it’s now become apparent that having surgery to remove the tumour may not be your best course of action. A recent study has shown that of those who elected to have the cancer removed surgically, more died than those who did not. For every 100 patients in the study, 11 more were alive in the group that didn’t choose surgery. This is largely because of the additional risk which surgery creates and also because of the additional risks when surgery is performed on the elderly.
It’s important to remember that this study only involved people over the age of 66. For those younger and less at risk of complications caused by surgery it may well be the case that surgery is the best option. Further study is required to make any of this definitive.
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