Week 4

There are are many different kinds of treatments for breast cancer patients and some work better than others for every individual person. The three main medical treatments are surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Surgery is done to remove the lump in the breast and then the other treatments are followed. A lot of the time people with advanced stages of cancer need both treatments. Chemotherapy often has really bad side affects and it varies from person to person. The most common side affect that usually affects every person is hair loss. The dosage you get and how many times a week you get it all depends on the type of cancer and how advanced the cancer is. Radiation isn't as intense of a treatment as chemotherapy and people who only get radiation don't have an advanced form of cancer.

"Chemotherapy is the general term for any treatment involving the use of chemical agents to stop cancer cells from growing. Chemotherapy can eliminate cancer cells at sites great distances from the original cancer. As a result, chemotherapy is considered a systemic treatment."

"Chemotherapy is designed to kill cancer cells. Chemotherapy can be administered through a vein, injected into a body cavity, or delivered orally in the form of a pill, depending on which drug is used.

Chemotherapy works by destroying cancer cells; unfortunately, it cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and some healthy cells. So chemotherapy eliminates not only the fast-growing cancer cells but also other fast-growing cells in your body, including, hair and blood cells.
Some cancer cells grow slowly while others grow rapidly. As a result, different types of chemotherapy drugs target the growth patterns of specific types of cancer cells. Each drug has a different way of working and is effective at a specific time in the life cycle of the cell it targets."

"Radiation therapy uses a special kind of high-energy beam to damage cancer cells. (Other types of energy beams include light and x-rays.) These high-energy beams, which are invisible to the human eye, damage a cell’s DNA, the material that cells use to divide.

Over time, the radiation damages cells that are in the path of its beam — normal cells as well as cancer cells. But radiation affects cancer cells more than normal cells."

Other treatments are hormone therapy which consists mainly of medicine taken orally and it prevents hormones from developing. "Hormone therapy , including tamoxifen in premenopausal women, and the aromatase inhibitors Arimidex, Aromasin and Femara in postmenopausal women. Hormone therapy uses drugs to prevent hormones, especially estrogen, from promoting the growth of breast cancer cells that may remain after breast cancer surgery."