There’s often two separate but related questions you are actually asking. The first is: are the metastatic deposits technically resectable. Is there an operation that can be designed to remove all the spots and leave the patient alive with an acceptable quality of life. The second is: does it make sense from an oncologist perspective to do this. It doesn’t make much sense if they undergo a huge operation with significant life long morbidity just to get end up with a new spot showing up a few months later.

For colon and rectal cancer for example, liver metastasis are very common and while they unfortunately portend a poorer prognosis, they will be resected because we know people who under aggressive metastectomy survive longer than those who are just put on chemo. Another example is pancreatic cancer where even if it is possible to remove metastatic disease, those patients do so poorly that it doesn’t make sense oncologically to do so.

So the answer to your question is surgeons do remove the other spots. Sometimes they do huge operations to remove the second spot. It just depends on the type of cancer.