Humans have a way of making everything so complicated. It really shouldn?t be, it should be easy and fun even though if it?s hard work.
But we are literally talking about curing cancer here, i.e. killing bad human cells without also killing off the good human cells. That just *is* complicated, or at the very least
complex.
Imagine a doctor performing emergency surgery to in order to remove a razor-sharp bullet fragment from a patient without cutting an artery and causing them to bleed to death - could you imagine this being "easy and fun"?
What about a SWAT team trying to take out a terrorist group without having any harm come to the hostages - you think there is a way to make this "easy and fun"?
Because this is essentially what cancer treatment comes down to.
I know I went completely off the subject but I do think we need a better system in bio chemistry as well. I just know that much about it to really say yet. But I think it.
I mean, there are certainly aspects in which the way we *teach* biochemistry could be improved to make it less
complicated, but in the end, it is always going to be an immensely
complex subject.
Sorry if I am coming off as abrasive, but there are brilliant people out there who have dedicated their lives to curing cancer, and have come up with some amazingly effective treatments, yet do not get the respect they deserve for it. Remember, it wasn't too long ago that Hodgkins lymphoma was a death sentence. Today, this type of cancer is easily treatable.
Yet people do not accept these treatments for the amazing accomplishments they are, insisting that there has to be a 100% effective cure for all cancers out there that is being held back by "the man"/"big pharma". Oncologists may not always have the best bedside manners, but atleast they're not bullshitting you like some quack who's telling to you that you can cure your cancer by just smoking lots of weed (spoiler: You can't. Bob fucking Marley died of cancer because he wouldn't listen to the docs when they told him they'd have to amputate his big toe to make sure his melanoma wouldn't return).
Often, these conspiracy theories about "big pharma" holding back the ultimate panacea betray not just a fundamental misunderstanding about the way biochemistry works, but also basic economics (the pharmaceutical industry is not a monolith; if Pfizer developed a cancer panacea, they would quickly rake in billions, and would not give a fig if it meant major losses for Novartis, Eli Lilly, Boehringer, etc... after all, those are *the competition*. Also, old people not dying of cancer means them getting even older, which means they get to live to buy drugs against heart disease, arthritis, dementia (...) as well as more of the anticancer drug, should the cancer return). It also conveniently ignores the fact that pharma CEO's also tend to be old dudes, who tend to be very much afraid of losing friends, loved ones and their own lives to cancer.
Don't you think that it is extremely frustrating for doctors to have patients come in that could have been cured with relative ease had they come in a year earlier, but now that the cancer has progressed to an advanced stage, their chances of survival are much slimmer? And of course they're not blaming the quacks for delaying the potentially life-saving treatment, they're getting pissed off at "big pharma" for not being able to cure their tumors now that they're metastasizing all over their bodies.