Cancer: Choosing Treatment Options
August 29th, 2007 by SKCagency Health Associate
Cancer treatment options include chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery. The main objective of the treatment is to destroy or eliminating the cancer cells in the body using appropriate medicines.
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy seeks the help of medicines to kill the cancer cells. The side effects of the chemotherapy would be severe. Side effects of chemotherapy varies among different patients. Medicines will be given along with the chemotherapy agents to minimize the side effects.
Chemotherapy would be conjugated with surgery. After removing the cancerous tissue, chemotherapy is advocated to prevent the further occurrence of the cancer.
Radiotherapy
Special kind of X-ray, gamma rays or electrons are being use to provide radiation—to destroy cancer cells. Radiotherapy may be used with other therapies, such as surgery. There will be no pain during radiotherapy. The tumors that grow in one place is usually treated with combination of radiotherapy and surgery.
Surgery
Most of the successful treatment is noticed with surgical therapy because surgery will be performed in the localized tumor only. In case of malignant tumor (tumor in one place), it is safely removed along with healthy surrounding tissue.
Surgery is limited to the patients with multiple area cancer including liver and brain.
Hi Alvin,
wonder if you can advise, after completing 4 of the 5 chemo sessions, would prefer not to go for the proposed radiotherapy, as time consuming as well as no promise of clean bill of health, also the past chemo sessions
suffered few disruption on the said schedule due blood count problems.
thanks and best regards
sw
Hi Simon
I would suggest to complete all the sessions. My aunt recovered after 2 yrs of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and medication. Even back then, the doctor could not gaurantee any success rate.
Today she is better and recovered but she still has to go back once a year on a follow up, just to ensure that the cancer cells do not spread or reoccur. Medical costs are never cheap, but it is better to take the advice from your personal doctor than not all, as we are not professionally trained in this line.
Our blog only hopes to raise awareness for the public and helped many out there to look out for symptoms, and possible medications out there. We also advise most people who had gone through this stage to at least now look into the coverage for their family members, to be better protected through medical and life insurance, so that they too would have better security financially if they require the money. If you had gone through this stage you probably know how enormous the bills can be in hospital treatments, even though it is covered by medical plans. Even so, medication itself can also be a huge burden (long term medication are not covered under medical plans).
Hope you get better soon.
Warm Rgds
Alvin Soong