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Cancer treatments

There are hundreds of different treatments and procedures for cancer and which ones you use will which largely depend on what type of cancer you have, how advanced the disease is, what your physical state of health is, what age you are and if you have any other medical conditions.

The most common conventional treatments are chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy and drugs and quite often a combination of each is likely. All treatments have side effects but most of these can be managed well.

Surgery is a major procedure and involves removing the cancerous tissue and the areas immediately around he cancerous cells if it is possible. A hospital stay is often required as well as a period of rest and recovery once you have been discharged after surgery.

For cancers affecting large areas or when cancer has spread to lymph nodes, surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy combined will achieve good results in stopping the cancer.

Chemotherapy is given to more than half of all cancer patients and involves metered doses of drugs fed to the body through an intravenous tube into the veins, taken by mouth or inserted into the anus. It is commonly given after surgery and sometimes a combination of all methods is used. Side effects include hair loss, nausea, loss of balance, lethargy and headaches.

Radiation in high doses damages the cancerous cells by exposing the affected areas of the body to the radiation through an x-ray like procedure or by implanting radioactive materials inside the body. It’s often used before surgery to reduce the size of a cancerous mass.

The downside to radiation is that is also kills the good healthy cells around the cancerous area as well as the bad ones. Radiation is used in combination with chemotherapy.

Biological therapy (or biotherapy) acts indirectly to kill tumours or cancerous masses and includes antibody treatment, gene therapy, Haemopoietic growth and more commonly hormone therapy.

-Antibodies are genetically engineered substances placed on specific spots in the body such as in bone marrow or blood to be carried to the cancerous cells to stop or slow their growth. Used most commonly in lymphoma/leukaemia and breast cancer patients.

-Gene Therapy is a relatively new treatment still in the experimental stage with hundreds of clinical trials for cancer, pain autoimmune disease and HIV/Aids treatment being conducted all around the world.

It uses DNA or healthy copies of DNA to correct faulty cells or to boost immunity to coax the body to naturally overcome faulty cells or cancerous growths.

-Haemopoietic Growth Factors are used to stimulate the production of healthy blood cells as an alternative treatment to bone marrow transplants and to treat neutropaenia which is a blood disorder with low levels of a white blood cells (white blood cells helps destroy bacteria) caused by  chemotherapy.

-Hormone therapy (also known as endocrine treatment, hormonal therapy, hormone treatment) is most commonly used to treat prostate, breast, cervical or uterine cancers by adding, blocking or removing hormones. In people with diabetes or women experiencing menopause hormones are replaced to adjust low levels.

Targeted therapy is a new form of cancer treatment only used on some forms of cancer which targets proteins on the surface of cancerous cells. It is used on small areas of cancer usually using drugs to attack specific cancer cells without damaging healthy normal cells. A monoclonal antibody is a type of targeted therapy.