alt Hacker News>>> ... the study found that removing the parachute prior to jumping led to a shocking increase in mortality among skydivers.
When there's a clear causal mechanism, additional research that doesn't propose a clear resolution to the underlying problem doesn't negate the clear causal mechanism. Releasing a bunch of loose cancer into the body is a clear causal mechanism, so unless you're filtering it or killing the loose cancer somehow, I'm not sure what those studies could tell you that overcomes the underlying problem. And until they address that problem, it's going to be limited to a quality of life type application - stopping the tumor from killing you now with the certainty of metastasis killing you later.
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Some tumor types metastasize well, others not so much. But the article doesn't say anything about metastasis, or leaving any cells behind from the target. Rather, it talks about destroying the targeted cells entirely, leaving behind only proteins.
So what's the problem? The vast majority of cancer treatments seek only to put the condition into remission for a while. Realistically that's often all that can be done.
The thing about this kind of 'just so' story causal mechanism is that we still have to actually do the science to find out. Your body does filter and kill potentially cancerous cells all the time already. And cancer cells aren't like, some super thing that evolved to kill you specifically. My just-so story goes like this: 'the cancer cells die because they're suddenly outside of the specific bodypart that they were exploiting'. And we're probably both right, depending on the location of the cancer, the type of cancer, etc.