Types of Cancer Treatments

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Dr. Kenneth Fink. I'm a medical oncologist at Zimmer Cancer Center at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina. There are different types of cancer treatments and patients often come wondering how how we're going to put those all together. But often when we have a patient with cancer, we'll actually have a pretty large meeting between all the different types of doctors and caretakers. For example, the medical oncologist such as myself may get together with the radiation oncologist, the surgical oncologist and talk with the pathologist and radiologist and really go over the cases in great detail. This is called the tumor board. When the tumor board meets , we tend to talk about patients that are just being diagnosed with cancer and try to come up with the different treatments. The usual order of things is to first, find the cancer and if possible have it removed surgically. So, if a cancer is confined to one particular area of the body, let's say the lung or the breast or the colon and we do tests and find out that the cancer has not spread in many places. A surgeon will definitely be getting involved in trying to remove the cancer. Once that's done, we'll have a more a greater characterization of the cancer and be able to tell whether we need more treatments. Additional treatments that can be given after a surgery might include radiation therapy. So, for example, if the surgeon couldn't quite get at all or the cancer had spread a little bit outside of the site where he could remove it, radiation could be incorporated and try to try to sterilize the cancer. If there's still some chances that the cancer has perhaps spread elsewhere or indeed we find out that the cancer has spread outside of the original site, then we'll get chemotherapy involved. These are drugs, they tend to be a bit like poisons in the sense that they can kill cancer cells, it tend to cause some side effects for patients but we've improved that side effect to profile quite a bit and the drugs have gotten much better as well. There are other many other forms of treatments of cancer , the radiologist have gotten involved and can put probes into cancers and try to heat them up and destroy them that way or even freeze them and their are many new therapies going on in radiation with many new techniques. So, I'd say that the treatment, the various types of treatment in cancer have gotten quite diverse and every case has to be looked at individually."