Not a doctor either, but early stage cancers are characterized by local tumors, and are often treatable. Late stage cancers involve the cancer cells spreading throughout the body and many tumor in multiple organs.
I'm not a doctor but just had a loved one die of cancer, and what the parent has said is correct from what I learned. Here is a breast cancer survival breakdown by stage:
Stage 1 they do pretty much exactly what you propose: lumpectomy (take out the tumor), radiation (zap tumor cells in a localized way) and chemo (poison yourself, but with a poison that especially likes to kill tumor cells). The survival rate after 5 years is 99%.
By contrast you have Stage 4 with a survival rate of 15% after 5 years. This is when the cancer has metastasized. This basically means the cancer isn't just in that body part (in my link, the breast), it's all over the body. For my loved one there were many many tumors on the lungs, kidney, liver, and tailbone. Even worse, it's in the blood, which means even if you could remove all these tumors (and put your body through horrible trauma to do so), they would still come back. At this point you don't cure the disease, you treat it and hope for the best. There are many many different types of treatment. Some won't work for a specific person, some will, but only for awhile, and if you're very lucky some may cure the person, but there are no guarantees and doctors play a bit of a guessing game.
Although there are many different types of cancer, in these later stages there are very few ways a person dies. The cancer breeds in places with high cell turnover in mission critical organs (lungs, kindneys, liver) and you die.
unfortunately most of our knowledge of the subject usually doesn't come as a result of sheer curiosity :( I already had members of my extended family lost to the disease, and my father had piece of a lung removed and tumor in the second irradiated during the last year. My original comment in no way was intended as "cure all", more just about feasibility of another [may be easier on the body] technical implementation of early stages surgery and radiation procedures as well as for palliative surgeries at the late stages.
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/type/breast-can...
Stage 1 they do pretty much exactly what you propose: lumpectomy (take out the tumor), radiation (zap tumor cells in a localized way) and chemo (poison yourself, but with a poison that especially likes to kill tumor cells). The survival rate after 5 years is 99%.
By contrast you have Stage 4 with a survival rate of 15% after 5 years. This is when the cancer has metastasized. This basically means the cancer isn't just in that body part (in my link, the breast), it's all over the body. For my loved one there were many many tumors on the lungs, kidney, liver, and tailbone. Even worse, it's in the blood, which means even if you could remove all these tumors (and put your body through horrible trauma to do so), they would still come back. At this point you don't cure the disease, you treat it and hope for the best. There are many many different types of treatment. Some won't work for a specific person, some will, but only for awhile, and if you're very lucky some may cure the person, but there are no guarantees and doctors play a bit of a guessing game.
Although there are many different types of cancer, in these later stages there are very few ways a person dies. The cancer breeds in places with high cell turnover in mission critical organs (lungs, kindneys, liver) and you die.