What Is Chemotherapy?

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Dr. David Cathcart. I'm a family practice physician from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, and we're going to talk about chemotherapy drugs, and their side effects today. Chemotherapy refers to chemical treatment, chemo, therapy. So any treatment using a chemical, for the treatment of some disease, is chemotherapy. It's just that when usually when we're referring to the treatment of cancer. But actually chemotherapy can be in reference to any illness. An antibiotic for example is a chemotherapy. Treatment of high blood pressure with a blood pressure medication is chemotherapy. And treatment of diabetes is chemotherapy. But the fact is, that we usually refer to chemotherapy in terms of cancer. Chemotherapy actually refers to the killing of cells, or cytotoxic mechanism of killing cells. And the cells that we're talking about here are cancer cells, that rapidly divide. And if you've watched any of the other portions of this series, you'll know by now, that cancer cells are rapidly dividing, and chemotherapy kills any cell that's dividing. Whether it's dividing fast, or it's dividing slow. But if it's in the process of dividing, that cell's going to die under the effects of chemotherapy. But the notion of treating cancer with these cytotoxic drugs, is that cancer cells divide very rapidly. So they're going, going, going, going. In the meantime, the other cells over here, like your skin cell, or your stomach cell, or whatever cell is dividing at a much slower rate. So when you give chemotherapy, you're killing all these cells that are dividing very rapidly, and you're killing the occasional other cell that's dividing at a much slower rate. But, you kill off a bunch of these chemotherapy cells, some are still alive, because some of them have not been dividing, hopefully you've not killed off too many of the cells that are normal, because they're dividing so much slower. Again, chemotherapy does not generally kill cells that are not dividing. And all cells go through a stage where they'll divide, and then they rest for a while. And then they divide again, then they rest for a while. It's only when they're dividing that they're susceptible to the cytotoxic effects of chemotherapy. This is Dr. Cathcart telling you what chemotherapy is, and how it does its job."