Current cancer treatments
Cancer is almost always treated with surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy. Often doctors will use more than one of these treatments to try and get the best results. This page gives an overview of current cancer treatments. Increasingly, patients may also receive a new cancer treatment alongside traditional therapy.
Surgery
A surgical operation to remove a solid tumor is the most common form of cancer treatment. It offers the best chance of cure for many cancers that have not spread. When the cancer has grown or spread outside the organ where it originated, surgery is often used in combination with radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy.
Smaller scale surgery is often used in cancer diagnosis to remove a small tissue sample for examination (called a “biopsy”). This is used to diagnose or grade the cancer. A biopsy may also be used in the staging process to find out how far a cancer has spread.
Radiotherapy
Radiotherapy aims to get rid of cancer by killing cancer cells in and around a specific tumor. It works by directing a stream of high-energy particles (radiation) onto the affected tissue, and can be used to treat solid and non-solid tumors.
Radiation has side effects because it kills normal cells as well as cancer cells. For this reason, doctors have to carefully balance the dose and timing of the treatment to allow normal tissues to recover.
Radiation can also be used to:
- Reduce the size of a tumor before surgery
- Prevent the cancer from coming back after an operation
- Destroy any cancer cells that may have escaped surgery
Chemotherapy
This form of treatment uses drugs that can destroy cancer cells. There are dozens of different chemotherapy drugs. The choice of which to use depends on the type of cancer, its grade and its stage. Doctors may also take into account the patient’s age and overall health. Two or more chemotherapy drugs are often used together; this is called combination chemotherapy.
Like radiation, chemotherapy may be used before surgery. It is often used after surgery to eliminate any surviving cancer cells around the tumor site. It can also help destroy cancer cells that have spread to other parts of the body.
Chemotherapy causes unwanted side effects – such as hair loss, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea – because it also kills normal healthy cells. But these problems usually get better as soon as treatment is interrupted or finished. Medicines like anti-sickness drugs can often help to make side effects less severe.
