Thursday, April 25, 2013

Researcher: Advancements in Radiation Treatments


One of the things we talked about in class was about radiation and how now there is this new form of radiation that is basically giving radiation in small doses to patients. Aggressively fighting the cancer cells in someone’s body and trying to get all the cancer out as soon as possible isn’t the motive, but to live with cancer and control it and then fight it is the motive. Talking about this new form of radiation got me thinking about the other treatments for cancer, as well as the differences between similar treatments; as well as the current advancement in cancer. It turns up the 50% of patients who have cancer will have some form of radiation therapy. One of the new forms of radiation is a 3D Conformal Radiation Therapy which is to improve the precision with which radiation is delivered to tumors and leads to minimizing radiation dose to healthy tissues (1). The newest form of 3D conformal radiation therapy is Intensity-modulated radiation therapy. This form changes the shape of the beams and it varies the intensity of radiation within each beam. These two forms of radiation key points are that they are able to minimize the amount of radiation dose to healthy tissues, which sounds like a good thing and maybe a really big improvement. Even these new forms of radiation are to aggressively fight cancer and its reproduction. The fact that these little changes make such a big difference is huge and shows how things are changing for the better very rapidly.


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