The goal of every cancer treatment is to achieve a cure for your illness, allowing you to live a normal, healthy life span. If the chances of a cure are less, your treatments will be targeted towards reducing the growth of your cancer, allowing you to live a symptom-free life for as long as possible.
Cancer Treatments Might Be Used As:
Primary Treatment: Primary treatment is used to completely remove cancer from your body or kill any and all the cancer cells. Any targeted treatment can be used as a primary treatment, but the most common of primary cancer treatments for the most common types of cancer is surgery. If your type of cancer is particularly sensitive to radiation therapy or chemotherapy, however, you may receive one of those solutions as your primary treatment.
Adjuvant Treatment: The main goal of adjuvant therapy is to kill any cancer cells that may remain after the primary treatment is given in order to reduce the chance that the cancer will return. Again, any cancer treatment can be used as adjuvant therapy. Common adjuvant therapy options include chemotherapy, radiation therapy as well as hormone therapy.
Palliative Treatment: Palliative treatments are used to help relieve the side effects of treatments or signs and symptoms caused by cancer itself. Treatments like surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormone therapy can all be used to relieve symptoms or side effects. Other medications can be used to relieve symptoms such as pain and shortness of breath.
Treatments Include:
Surgery: The goal is to try to remove as much of the affected cells as possible.
Chemotherapy: This uses drugs to kill cancer cells.
Radiation Therapy: This uses strong, high-powered energy beams, to kill cancer cells.
Bone Marrow Transplant: This uses your own bone marrow stem cells or those from a donor to use higher doses of chemotherapy to treat your cancer.
Immunotherapy: This uses your body’s immune system to fight cancer.
Hormone Therapy: Removing cancer-susceptible hormones from the body or blocking their effects may cause the cancer cells to stop growing.
Targeted Drug Therapy: This focuses on the specific abnormalities within cancer cells that allow them to survive.
Cryoablation: This treatment kills cancer cells with cold.
Radiofrequency Ablation: These treatments use electrical energy to heat cancer cells, causing them to die.
Clinical Trials: These are studies to investigate new ways of treating cancer. Thousands of cancer clinical trials are underway.