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Cancer – Radiation Types

February 1, 2021
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Transcript

“So one of the main tools we use with cancer management is radiation therapy. And your medical oncologist does not give or provide radiation. There are very specialized physicians called radiation oncologists that will give radiation as part of your treatment, if it’s indicated. The problem is, there are several different types of radiation that is delivered. And those methods that may make one scared of getting radiation. For example, with head and neck cancers and say, anal cancers, radiation is a backbone to several of those, to where you get prolonged radiation over five to six weeks in an area that’s very sensitive. So if you have a mass in your neck, then the radiation can cause pretty significant symptoms towards the end of it because it’s like a prolonged sunburn. It can have difficulty with swallowing, or if it’s on the anal side, then it may be painful to sit.

But certainly that is not the experience when you’re using radiation in other capacities. One, if it’s not in areas that are more intimately involved with pain receptors, but also there are radiation methods that we call, for example, SBRT, or stereotactic, where it’s only three or four days, if that sometimes one or two days, and it treats something in a very small, precise manner. There’s also things that are called palliative radiation to your bones, which again, usually aren’t involved with pain, but instead treating lesions in your bone to just make your bones not as painful, if you do have cancer involvement. So please understand there are different kinds of radiation that are all piecemeal and put together for their different indications and experiences, depending on what that radiation indication is. And the modality that’s being used widely vary between tumor type and their purpose.”

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