CHAPTER 4 --- General Comments About  Cancer Treatments

Now that I know the type of cancer, the stage, and the 5 year survival rate is, can you tell me about cancer treatments?

There are many different types of cancer therapies. Some are well established and some more experimental. Some treatments have proven to be useful only in certain cancers and not in others.

As you do your research, you’ll become very familiar very quickly with the treatments being used for the particular cancer you’re researching.

This is just a brief introduction. Before you ultimately decide on a particular form of therapy you’ll need to investigate it thoroughly.

You’ll need to know the cure rate, the side effects, how long you’ll be incapacitated, etc.

But here is a very basic introduction:

The most well-known cancer therapies are:

1.   Surgery;

2.   Chemotherapy;

3.   Radiation Therapy.

Often the standard treatment for a cancer is a combination of various therapies. For example, the standard treatment might be surgery followed by chemotherapy or surgery followed by radiation therapy:

• Chemotherapy is a type of drug which kills cells. The principle is to give toxic substances which kill cells and hopefully will kill the fastest growing cells (the cancer cells) at a higher rate than the regular body cells.

• Surgery is the removal of tissue by physical means such as taking out a cancerous lung or removing a cancerous prostate.

• Radiotherapy is the killing of cancerous cells using ionizing radiation. This radiation can either be given internally or, more commonly, externally.

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