Getting the news that you have cancer can be devastating. However, you must immediately lead on to how you’re going to fight against cancer so you can beat it one day. You’ll have to listen to your doctors to find out how that’s possible.
A good question, though, is how do doctors figure out in the first place how to cure cancer. Doctors usually take multiple steps in figuring out their diagnosis, ensuring that they can come up with the right type of treatment for their patients. Take a look into these ways doctors figure out how to treat cancer.
Type
First, doctors must figure out what type of cancer they are dealing with. This is done by taking scans of various parts of your body before searching for any malignant tumors. Once a doctor has confirmed that they have found tumors, they will try to confirm again to ensure that you have the type of cancer they believe you have.
This step is important since different types of cancer might require more aggressive forms of chemotherapy. If not done aggressively, you can end up dying from cancer even while being in a more preventable phase.
Phase
Speaking of phases, doctors must find out how what phase of cancer you currently are in. This process isn’t easy at all, as different types of cancer have different thresholds for each phase. For example, doctors have to look at age, tumor location. blood levels, and more before figuring out how far along someone’s cancer diagnosis is.
Doctors undergo hard work whenever figuring out someone’s cancer phase, as each cancer phase can mean life or death with the right type of treatment administered.
Chemotherapy
Once doctors have a good idea of what type of cancer they are currently dealing with, it’s time for them to come up with the right chemotherapy treatment to save their patients. With chemotherapy, doctors have to be extremely careful in giving the right dosage to their patients, as chemotherapy can give life-threatening side effects to those that don’t get the right dosage they are supposed to get. Fortunately, scientists have ways they can determine how much to give to their patients.
For some doses, doctors will take the bodyweight of a patient to find out exactly how much chemotherapy they need. Some types of chemotherapy go by body surface area, combining the height and weight of patients. Either way, doctors will usually always double-check to ensure they are giving their patients the right dosage.
Remission
If chemotherapy proves to be successful, a patient goes into a process called remission. This process lasts for a certain amount of time to ensure that someone’s cancer doesn’t come back, as cancer can often come back to those that took chemotherapy even months ago.
To keep a good eye on their patients, doctors will require patients to undergo regular scans of areas that would contain tumors if their cancer came back. Doctors keep following up until they either have patients go back to chemotherapy or until they believe that the cancer in their body is permanently gone.
