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Hello there! If you're here you must know at least a little bit about cancer and why it's bad...
If you don't... it's simple: it kills people. Now, killing is bad – death is bad in general
So when people say they found a cure for cancer, that's great!
Before the mid late 1900s, if you got cancer, you were basically screwed.
But then things like radiation therapy, chemotherapy, and hormone therapy were discovered
Where, instead of dying, you would effectively spend weeks feeling like you were dying
Throwing up, losing hair, and constantly being tired... the whole shebang.
In short, they messed you up pretty bad. Arguably, worse than that. But hey, at least you were alive.
The mid/late 1900s were when most cancer treatments were discovered.
Radiation therapy was discovered in 1901, followed by chemotherapy in the 1940s
and then hormone therapy in 1946.
Finally, immunotherapy was discovered and used in 1948.
While this was all fine and dandy, all of these treatments did not work too reliably.
Like I said before, many of these would just mess you up
and you'd probably feel like death was a better option anyway.
After all, these treatments killed more than just the tumour cells,
They also carried non cancerous cells as well.
But hey, between you and me,
There's evidence that treatments for cancer existed as early as the 1600 BC,
but most of these treatments still ended up killing patients rather than treating them.
Now that you know a little history, let's move on to precision medicine.
You're probably wondering, what is precision medicine?
Well, it might not be what you think.
Precision medicine isn't something you can just inject into yourself and magically cure cancer
That'd be like prescribing 3 doses of philosophy
or telling a patient they should rub 1 mL of gene therapy into where it hurts.
Precision medicine is a medical model, or in normal speak,
a way of accurately and precisely treating people.
Scientists spent decades trying to find a difference between cancer and normal body cells
But after they managed to do that,
immunotherapy became a practical approach to treating cancer.
The key factor differentiating immunotherapy and other forms of cancer treatment
is a reliance on precision medicine,
which itself is reliant on specific biomarkers to determine the existence of a certain type of cancer.
With new technologies and discoveries related to the field of medicine,
the idea of precision medicine has evolved into a reality.
Personalised medicine is revolutionising our ability to treat cancer
and even though not all people are eligible to use precision medicine right now,
new biomarkers are being discovered at an incredible rate due to their reliability
and we are slowly understanding more and more about cancer
Anyway, I hope I helped clear up a lot of questions
about precision medicine and cancer in general.
Thank you and goodbye!