![]() ![]() Your doctor will choose the doses, how the drugs will be given, and how often and how long you’ll get treatment. You and your cancer doctor ( oncologist) will decide what drug or combination of drugs you will get. But when it’s used with the goal of comfort, chemo becomes part of a palliative care plan. It can be confusing when chemo is used as a palliative treatment, because it’s most often used to try to cure or control the cancer. For example, anti-nausea treatments or pain medicines are palliative, and can be used at all stages of treatment. It’s important to know that treatment used to reduce symptoms or improve comfort is called palliative care. For instance, chemo may be used to help shrink a tumor that’s causing pain or pressure so the patient feels better and has less pain. When the cancer is at an advanced stage, probably cannot be controlled, and has spread, the goal of giving chemo may be to improve the quality of life or help the person feel better. This is called palliation, palliative chemotherapy, or treatment with palliative intent. PalliationĬhemo can also be used to ease symptoms caused by the cancer. In other cases, the cancer may go away for a while, but it’s likely to come back. In many cases, the cancer doesn’t completely go away, but is controlled and managed as a chronic disease, much like heart disease or diabetes. This can help the person with cancer feel better and live longer. In these cases, chemo is used to shrink tumors and/or stop the cancer from growing and spreading. If a cure is not possible, the goal of cancer treatment may be to control the disease. It often takes many years to know if a person’s cancer is really cured. So, when giving treatment that might have a chance of curing a person’s cancer, the doctor may describe it as treatment with curative intent.Īlthough cure may be the goal in these situations, and is the hope of many who have cancer, it doesn’t always work out that way. Most doctors don’t use the word “cure” except as a possible or intended result of treatment. If possible, chemo is used to cure cancer, meaning that the cancer is destroyed – it goes away and doesn’t come back. There are three main goals for chemotherapy (chemo) in cancer treatment: If your doctor has recommended chemotherapy as an option to treat your cancer, it’s important to understand the goals of treatment when making treatment decisions. Treatments like these are called local treatments because they affect one part of the body. Surgery removes a tumor from a part of the body where cancer has been found, and radiation therapy is aimed at a certain area of the body to kill or damage cancer cells. This makes it different from treatments like surgery and radiation. There are also other drugs that are used to treat cancer in different ways, including targeted therapy, hormone therapy, and immunotherapy.Ĭhemo is considered a systemic treatment because the drugs travels throughout the body, and can kill cancer cells that have spread (metastasized) to parts of the body far away from the original (primary) tumor. The information below describes traditional or standard chemotherapy. While traditional or standard chemotherapy is still the best way to treat many cancers, different kinds of drugs may work better for others. It used to be that the only kind of drug that could treat cancer was traditional or standard chemo, but now there are a lot of different kinds of drugs used to treat cancer. It's important to know that not all medicines and drugs to treat cancer work the same way. But to most people, the word chemotherapy (or "chemo") means drugs used for cancer treatment. Chemotherapy refers to the use of any drug to treat any disease. ![]()
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