One thing I don't understand is this attitude of "well we can't detect it, so job is done". I don't know the specifics of detectability, but presumably it means that n<N for some N. So there could still be some cells left. Why not throw every weapon in the arsenal at them, to ensure the cancer is completely gone?
EDIT, addendum: If you have a few treatments that each can kill 9999/10000 cancer cells. It seems the current approach is apply treatment a. Not detectable yay! They grow back to original numbers. Apply treatment b! etc. If you did them all at once, they wouldn't have time to grow back in-between treatments giving a larger chance you get them all.
This is correct. As a matter of fact, even dosing one chemotherapy may be a challenge for a patient if the side effects are too server (lowered immune resistance, can't keep food down, etc). We're talking about drugs with such small therapeutic windows that given too often can easily kill a healthy human.
That's general audience information that discusses treatments before and after surgery that are intended to work along with the surgery. If you click through to the various therapies, there is lots of discussion of combining them.
Great question. I've wondered the same thing for bacterial infections. Wouldn't it lower the risk of resistant bacteria developing to always use two different types of anti-biotics, so in case a few bacteria develop a resistance to one, they're still killed by the other.
This is much easier for bacterial infections vs cancer -- chemotherapy is (excuse the non-medical phrase) very close to actual poison. Antibiotics are very well-tolerated, so taking two at once is something that could be done and is indeed deployed in serious infections or when there is high risk of one.
This - nearly all antibiotics target parts of the bacterial cell that humans don't have. Antifungals have the problem that many of their targets are shared between eukaryotic fungal cells and our own. Chemotherapy agents have a huge problem in that they are targeting cells that used to be our own. It's a race between toxic to cancer cells and toxic to the rest of you.
EDIT, addendum: If you have a few treatments that each can kill 9999/10000 cancer cells. It seems the current approach is apply treatment a. Not detectable yay! They grow back to original numbers. Apply treatment b! etc. If you did them all at once, they wouldn't have time to grow back in-between treatments giving a larger chance you get them all.