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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