Cancer is a terrible disease that claims millions of lives across the world every year.
When someone has cancer, they will usually go through different types of treatments to try and heal them. There are a lot of treatments out there, so it’s important for people with cancer to learn about what treatments work best for their type of cancer.
This blog post talks about the various types of treatments available and how it helps cure patients with this illness.
Let us get started!
There are many different types of cancer treatment therapies. But radiation therapy is one that can be very effective. That’s because it uses high doses of radiation to kill cells and shrink tumors. For a while now, this has been the go-to treatment for those who have had prostate or breast cancer in particular – with great success!
There are majorly two types of cancer rations therapies – 1) External Radiation and 2) Internal Radiation.
External Radiation Beam
External beam radiation therapy is a form of cancer treatment that uses powerful beams to shoot high doses of energy at your tumor. The machine may be large and noisy, but it won’t touch you as the technician can move around you while administering treatments from various angles, so they cover more areas in one session than what would normally happen through localized radiotherapy alone.
The technicians who administer this type of radiation are specially trained for operating these machines, which means less stress on them when treating patients with external blast irradiation versus traditional methods such as brachytherapy or stereotactic body radiation (SBR).
Internal Radiation Treatment
Internal radiation therapy includes placing a source of radiation inside your body. The most common type, brachytherapy, has recently come to the forefront for its success with tumors that have been hard-to-reach or impossible to remove through surgery alone.
Internal radiation therapy can be administered via different methods like – placing seeds, ribbons, or capsules inside and near cancerous tissue (called interstitial implantation) OR by implanting radioactive material as close as possible under the skin surrounding where an organ was removed surgically – called percutaneous ipsilateral brachial plaque application.
As known by most people, Chemotherapy uses powerful targeted drugs to kill cancer cells.
Chemotherapy is a type of medication that works by stopping or slowing the growth of cancer cells, which grow and divide quickly. Chemotherapy can be used to:
● Treat cancer with an approach called curative intent where treatment will cure it, so there is no chance for recurrence in contrast to palliative care.
● Ease symptoms caused by tumors such as pain, nausea from chemotherapy drugs like cisplatin (a platinum-based drug), headaches from blood pressure drops associated with tumor shrinkage.
However, Chemotherapy not only kills rapidly dividing cancer cells but also leads to the death of healthy cells that grow and divide quickly. Examples are ones like those in your mouth or intestines, which cause side effects such as sores on the inside of your mouth from chemotherapy administration or nausea when it is administered intravenously.
Surgery involves the physical removal of a cancerous tumor from a patient’s body.
Surgery is the preferred treatment for cancers that are contained in one area. It’s a local treatment, meaning it treats only part of your body with cancer while not being an appropriate form of therapy for leukemia or other types which have spread to various parts throughout the human anatomy.
Surgical treatment for cancer typically involves the following goals;
● Removal of tumor in entirety
● Debulking or partial removal of the tumor in case the removal of the entire tumor might damage an organ or the body. Partially removing a tumor can also speed up other cancer treatments and reduce the load on nearby organs.
● To ease the pain and other cancer symptoms by surgically removing parts of the tumor that impart pressure on soft tissue.
Immunotherapy or Immuno-Oncology is essentially used to fight cancer using the patient’s own immune system. It is a biological therapy that uses our immune system’s capability to fight diseases and infections against cancer.
Our immune system is pre-programmed to detect and destroy abnormal cell growth (and likely prevents the development of many cancers during a person’s life). This is the reason Tumor-Infiltrating-Lymphocytes or TILs are found near many cancer tumors. TILs around a cancerous tumor are the indication that the patient’s immune system is responding to the cancerous growth.
However, cancer sometimes avoids detection and destruction by the immune system by either making itself less visible to the immune system (genetic masking), deploying proteins on its surface that deactivate immune cells, or use healthy cells as shields.
This is where the specificity of Immunotherapy comes into play. To enable the immune system to destroy cancer, the following types of immunotherapies can be administered;
1. Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors
2. Monoclonal Antibodies
3. T-Cell Transfer Therapy
4. Immune System Modulators
Many research advancements have been made in Immunotherapy, and this cancer treatment is slowly gathering high credibility like Chemotherapy, Radiation Therapy, etc.
If you’d like to consult about cancer, visit AIMS, Faridabad – a renowned center of excellence for cancer treatment.
You can contact us here.
Stay healthy, stay safe!