What is radiation therapy?
Radiation therapy along with modern advancements, has been successful in treating many cancer patients. Compared to the conventional techniques, current advanced modalities offer us with many benefits of radiotherapy.
There are many advantages of radiotherapy over chemotherapy and/or other conventional cancer therapies:
- Effective and comprehensive cancer treatment –Due to its comprehensive uses, radiation therapy, can be used in combination and/or alone for almost all types of cancers. Radiation therapy or radiotherapy, is not only used for curative treatment but also palliative therapy (for symptom relief) and helps in improving the quality of life of cancer patients.
- Specific and targeted treatment with less adverse effects to normal tissue –In addition of all-inclusive therapeutic roles in cancer treatment, radiation therapy, is also a target-specific and precise cancer treatment. Radiation therapy specifically aims and destroys the cancer cells irrespective of its location in the body. This reduces or shrinks the tumor in size simultaneously sparing the nearby unaffected normal structures in the body. This adds to one of the major reasons of effectiveness or success of radiation therapy for cancer treatment.
- Reduces risk of cancer recurrence –Radiation therapy is used for many common cancers, such as breast cancer, prostate cancer, and is effectively reduces the risk of cancer recurrence after surgery. Radiation therapy, either alone or combined with chemotherapy or other cancer treatment options, can be used as the curative treatment thereby avoiding surgery and related risks, for example – head and neck, prostate, lung, cervix and skin cancers. In advanced stages of some cancer types, radiation therapy is used as palliative therapy where it relieves cancer-related symptoms like pain and other problems such as bleeding from the lung or bladder.
- Cost effectiveness –Radiation therapy is usually given as an out-patient department setting, this reduces the hospital stay, hospital costs as well as time of patients and helps them continue with their normal activities. Such reasons make radiation therapy cost-effective and at the same-time time saving also.
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