Unfortunately, chemotherapy is still the best thing to treat many cancers.

We need to try harder to find other treatments. Poisoning the body is quite an unpleasant experience.

I’ve not really educated myself on the details of cancer treatments (I’m fortunate I’ve not had to learn yet), so my uneducated assumption was that chemo always did something for cancer, it was more a matter of weighing how much it helped fight the cancer vs. the harm it did to the otherwise healthy tissue/organs.

I wouldn’t have guessed the there are types of cancer where chemo just wouldn’t work at all.

Colleagues worked in some project for cancer research where they connected terminally ill patient with certain studies. Most of these studies did the same thing, sequencing DNA of the cancer and then finding the right combination of medicines. It turned out that sometimes the treatment was too successful with the right combination, and it killed all cancer cells in a very short time. This was also bad outcome as it was very toxic. Anyway a bunch of people with very late stages did survive all of this and are now cancer free. So now the researchers try to match the DNA with the right amount of treatment to strike a balance.