Can someone explain to me, in layman’s terms, the procedures for each of these treatments?
AFAIK, chemo involves the injection of chemicals, while radiation is just that: radiation.
However, which is more intrusive? Which takes longer for actual seesions? Do these sessions usually take an hour? two hours?Which takes longer to “recover” from? Do both induce hair loss and nausea? Do you have to schedule in advance either treatment or, if one wasn’t feeling well, can you have “impromptu” treatment? Are they interchangable (i.e.-can you alternate or do you usually just get one or the other?)
Sorry for all the questions…we are fighting ignorance here.
Thanks for your help.
Right. Chemo is broadly defined as any medicine given to treat cancer. Traditionally, chemotherapuetic agentics are poisons that block steps essential in cell division. Because cancer cells generally have a high rate of replication and most of the non-cancer cells of your body do not, these toxins are somewhat selectively toxic to cancer cells. Radiation therapy is focused, high intensity X-rays.
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The intrusiveness of chemo can vary from a constant infusion IV drip that you need to be in the hospital for to pills you take as an outpatient. This all depends on the type of chemo. Because there are many types of chemo, it’s tough to give an estimate of how long average chemo takes. Rad therapy involves 5X/wk trips to the hospital to be irradiated. Each session can take less than an hour.
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Again chemo is so varied that it’s difficult to comment on average chemo recovery time. With rad treatment, you get it daily over weeks. Recovery time depends mostly on whether the rad treatment inadvertantly damages surrounding healthy tissue, what that tissue is, and how much damage was done.
Radiation doesn’t induce hair loss and not all chemo does either. The “traditional” chemotherapies (cell division toxins) induce hair loss because hair production requires cell division. BTW, many types of cancer are treated with a combination of chemo and radiation (called chemo-rads).
There are many reasons why a therapy session might be deferred. However, the treatment regimens are based on studies in which a group of patients received a certain agent at certain dosing intervals. Voluntary breaks in treatment are generally discouraged because they are departures from these protocols and thus introduce questions about efficacy.
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No they’re pretty different. Generally, oncologic decision making works as follows:
If the cancer is only in one place in the body, and that place is surgically accessible, then surgery is the best bet.
If the cancer is in one place, but not ammenable to surgery, or if surgery alone is rarely curative for a particular cancer, then radiation treatment is used
If the cancer has unequivocally spread beyond a local area or if there is a statistically high likelihood of occult spread at the time of diagnosis, then chemotherapy is used. This is because chemo, unlike surgery or radiation, treats the whole body.
There are exceptions to these rules. For example, sometimes surgery is indicated in widely spread cancer to relieve a particular symptom (eg. bowel obstruction in metastatic colon cancer)
Some types of cancer respond better to a combination of chemo and radiation therapy. With others, there’s no improved response.
Sorry some of the answers are vague. If you gave an indication as to the type of cancer, then we caould talk about specific types of chemo and be more concrete.
There is a newer form of radiation therapy, called radiosurgery, that requires only one hospital visit. It uses a stronger but more intensely focused dose of radiation than traditional radiation therapy. I was given the choice between the two, and went with the radiosurgery. The benefits are that the procedure itself is over with in one day, and the patient only needs to deal with recovering from the side-effects of the radiation once. The downside is that if a mistake is made in directing the radiation, it can fry a healthy part of your body. With traditional radiation, each individual dose is low enough that if one is misdirected it won’t do much damage.
The chance of the radiation being misdirected is quite low, but it apparently worries patients enough that most choose traditional radiation therapy. However, my doctor said that he thinks within the next few years radiosurgery will become the procedure of choice.
Oh, I meant to address the OP’s question about the affects of radiation and the recovery process too. For me, the most obvious effect of the radiation was that is caused my face to swell up. This was especially bad in the morning; it tended to reduce during the day. Upon waking up, I could barely open my eyes. I also felt hot and somewhat fatigued, but this was not too bad – no worse than having a cold, really. My condition improved every day, and within about four days I was pretty much back to normal. The only lingering effect was anemia – radiation tends to induce anemia, so it is important for people recovering from radiation to make sure that they are getting plenty of iron. I spent a month or two on iron pills.
I did experience some hair loss, but my medical team told me that it was probably not due to the radiation but to other medical factors. That cleared itself up in a couple of months.
In the past year I’ve been on the receiving end of a couple of different types of radiation therapy.
Since the type of cancer I have is localized, I was given high-intensity external beam radiation
that was narrowly focused to an area about 2 in. by 3 1/2 in. Treatments lasted about 15 minutes once a day, five days a week for five weeks. In addition, I received radiation brachyotherapy which involves injecting radioactive pellets directly into the affected area. The pellets have a half life of about 18 days. I’ve suffered no hair loss or nausea, but still have bouts with diarrhea ocasionally, which is an after-effect of the treatment. So far, the treatment has shown exceptionally good results, and I’m feeling pretty healthy again.
I should point out that radiosurgery is presently confined largely to the brain.
In terms of other types of cancers, it not only depends on where the cancer is, but what kind of cancer you have. Different cancers have different genetic characteristics that require different treatments to be effective. For example, tamoxifen is often given to breast-cancer patients, but only if the cancer shows a specific genetic characteristic. It isn’t effective in cancers that don’t have that characteristic. The new chemo drugs exploit these characteristics, which is why many of them have fewer, if any, side effects.
As for radiation therapy, dosage is a very precise art. Radiation therapists and radiation oncologists spend years learning this art. Patients can spend a few sessions just on planning their treatment. Again, radiation is not for every kind of cancer, nor is it for every patient. There are a lot of factors that go into a decision for radiation therapy.