What causes cancer?
The truth is we don't know exactly what causes cancer on every single level, what we really know more about is what creates an environment that improves or enhances a cancer's chance of developing, so to speak. At the end of the road, when you say well, what causes cancer, it's twofold: 1, your immune system, which is essentially the police of your body, which are supposed to find any aberrant cells and destroy them, for some reason were either sleeping on the job, or taking some sort of extended lunch break, or is just not functioning properly. And there are a multitude of reasons why that may occur. Poor nutrition, sometimes people have other illnesses, medications that they're taking, but in some way shape or form the immune system is not on par. And that's one factor. The other factor is this cancer cell had to have developed some properties or abilities to evade the immune system, meaning if you were trying to hide from someone it would be great if you could become invisible. Well cancer cells have actually developed the ability to become invisible to the immune system. It would be great if you could hide inside of things that no one would look in, like you would hide in a closet. Well cancer cells actually hide within tissue, they masquerade as other things. So it's a combination of the cells developing these superpowers, so to speak, that allow them to disguise themselves, hide themselves, move into areas that the body isn't looking, in concert with the immune system maybe not looking quite as hard or even if it does find it, decide this is not something I feel like tackling today, I'm going to let you slide today. And that kind of balances how a cancer actually grabs hold and is allowed to develop. On a molecular level it's a little more complex than that. It's true that on a cellular level, there's usually some sort of damage done to important DNA which is involved in the immune system's ability to identify and destroy these cells, but that's a very complex answer and in reality, we're not at a point where it has any effect on treatment or prognosis. This is where bench research is occurring, but it really does not have any valid role in the way that we're treating patients right now, today.
