Treatment of cancer has advanced a great deal since my introduction to it via a loved one, and later on with a beloved dog. “Alternative” therapies are being researched and tested now, unlike then. There’s a place for both conventional medical science and herbal treatments, as well as dietary supplements.
I distrust genetic manipulation, maybe it’s a poor bias akin to the closed mindedness I encountered trying to help those I loved in any way possible back then, but I do. Some individuals inherit a propensity to develop certain cancers, true, but most of it is just cells gone wrong and not destroyed by the body’s natural defenses in time.
Live long enough, and you’ll develop cancer. It’s almost an inevitability.
I agree that all angles should be pursued. As far as genetic manipulation goes, genes code for proteins, and proteins control cell function. In the circumstance where run away cellular production is caused by a deficiency in production of the protein that regulates the reproductive cycle due to a malfunctioning gene, replacing that gene with a working one has some real possibilities. They’re early in the process at the moment.
There’s currently a trial for an inherited form of blindness where they’ve made it work, and I recently met a scientist who’s successfully repaired and replaced a defective gene that produces a certain form of heart failure.
Genetic manipulation is tricky ground, though, so your distrust is reasonable, in early work a child was cured of a rare inherited muscular disease, only to die of leukemia created by a previously unknown function of the gene they repaired. When you’re fiddling with the cellular reproductive cycle great care is required.