It affects millions of people on a daily basis. It can strike the young, the old, men or women, it has no code of ethics to speak of. It festers within your body, seemingly harmless at first, until it consumes the area around it, and then your entire body. It takes your energy, your time, and eventually your life. Cancer is quite possibly the biggest blight on society in the modern era. Cancer is a slow, creeping bubonic plague - ever present, and ever deadly. A single cellular mistake can cause months, or even years of pain for an individual, with the potential for death. Though it can be defended against by not pursuing an unhealthy lifestyle, it can still strike a healthy individual in their prime. Billions have been spent on research, …show more content…
The difficulty in combatting this particular disease is that we use the term cancer for these afflictions throughout the body, yet each one is a completely different strain of cancerous cells as they afflict different areas. To date, there is a little over 100 different types of cancer that can affect a human being, not to mention the genetic anomalies that have the possibility of occuring. This being the case, to perform tests that yield positive results for one type of cancer does nothing to improve the treatment of the other 100 types. This causes us to have a rather barbaric approach when attempting to irradicate the cancerous growths from the afflicted. They will either target the general area of the growth with ionizing radiation, or inject a toxic chemical concoction into the bloodstream which is known as chemotherapy. Very often both are applied, and every time these lead to serious side-effects, along with weakening the very immune system of the person they are trying to help. Hair-loss and digestive problems are just a start, as the incredible amount of daily pain and weakness is often times the hardest battle a person fighting cancer will have to overcome. After the patient has endured a "round" of treatment, surgery is often used to remove the growth(s) from the patient to try to stop the spread. Sometimes this works and the person can remain cancer free, but unfortunately it has a chance of coming back with a vengeance, and the chances of surviving it again begin to fall dramatically. Although progress has been made in other areas in search of a cure, such as stem-cells, progress is slow, and the deaths keep tallying