A light at the end of the tunnel: Cancer treatments for Cancer patients

There are different types of cancer classified by health care professionals. And with each type of cancer comes with a different kind of treatment. The cancer treatment typically relies on the stage of the cancer, age, health status, other personal characteristics, and most especially the cancer type. A patient may oftentimes need to have a combination of treatments, since there is no single treatment for cancer that can actually help the patient get rid of the disease. A combination of palliative care and series of therapies is frequently required for cancer patients.

Generally, treatments for cancer are categorized under surgery, chemotherapy, hormone therapy, radiation, gene therapy, or immunotherapy. These different treatment categories for the disease have been known to stop the development and further kill cancer cells inside the body.

Surgery is probably the oldest known treatment for cancer. This kind of treatment works for the patient if the cancer cells have not yet metastasized. Surgery has the capability to totally treat and heal the suffering individual by means of taking the cancer out from the body through surgical method. This is also influential in helping to manage symptoms like spinal cord compression or bowel obstruction. Oftentimes, surgery is conducted to patients diagnosed with breast or prostate cancer. However, if the disease has already spread out, it’s almost unattainable to remove all the cancer cells in the affected part.

Chemotherapy or usually referred as chemo is a treatment that makes use of drugs or chemicals to eradicate cancer cells in the body. These drugs will help in stopping the process of cell division, which will damage DNA or proteins so that cancer cells will die. Generally, chemo is required to those cancers that has already metastasized or spread out in the body, since the chemicals can travel all over the whole body and attack cancer cells. This is usually a treatment for lymphoma or leukemia. It takes place in series so the body has enough time to heal between dosages. More often, some drugs are given together rather than on their own. On the other hand, the treatment still has side effects like vomiting, hair loss, nausea, and fatigue.

Another kind of treatment is hormone therapy. This is intended to modify or change production of hormones in the body in order for cancer cells to stop growing or be totally killed. This is common to prostate and breast cancer, since they have been associated to a few kinds of hormones. A hormone therapy for prostate cancer often focuses on lessening the levels of testosterone and a breast cancer hormone therapy frequently focuses on decreasing the levels of estrogen.

Radiation, or radiotherapy, is another kind of cancer treatment, which works by destroying cancer by focusing high-energy rays on the cancer cells. As a result, the molecules that make-up the cancer cells are damaged, leading them to be totally killed. It makes us of high-energy gamma rays that are sent out from metals like high-energy x-rays or radium, which are formed in special machines. The treatment destroys cancer cells or shrinks the tumor and it can be combined with other kinds of treatment as well.

Gene therapy can treat cancer by replacing destroyed genes with ones that has the ability to work to address a root cause of cancer, damage to DNA. However, this treatment is considered new in the field and has not yet yielded any successful treatment for a patient.

Immunotherapy is a treatment for the disease that intends to get the immune system of the body to fight against the tumor. There are two kinds of immunotherapy: (1) systematic immunotherapy, which treats the entire body through controlling an agent like protein interferon alpha that shrinks tumors, and (2) local immunotherapy, wherein it injects a treatment into an affected area to cause inflammation that causes a tumor to shrink. This treatment can be considered targeted if the treatment particularly notifies the immune system to obliterate cancer cells. And it can also be regarded as non-specific if it enhances the abilities of fighting cancer through the stimulation of the whole immune system.