Learn more about Breast Chemotherapy
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Breast chemotherapy refers to the treatment applied to patients who suffer from breast cancer. Its purpose is to kill or to reduce in size the tumor consisting of cells that multiply very quickly compared to the normal rate of multiplication of normal cells. Breast chemotherapy can be of very many kinds depending on the combination of drugs that the doctor has selected for you. That is why it is highly important that patients and their family ask for clarifications from their doctors in case they haven’t understood how it all works and that they also know what side effects may be expected as a result of the medication.
There are two ways of administering breast chemotherapy: orally in cycles established by the doctor or intravenously. The drug reaches in the blood and then travels through the entire body to locate and attack the sick cells meant to be destroyed. The targeted elements of breast chemotherapy are the cancer cells in the mammary glands, but there will be collateral damage to. From this point of view doctors consider breast chemotherapy a systemic form of treatment precisely because it may act all throughout the patient’s organism.
Breast chemotherapy is often prescribed after lumpectomy or mastectomy and in these conditions it is referred to as adjuvant therapy. The treatment is possible in this form only when medical tests indicate that the cancer is limited to the breast area only.
Another situation when breast chemotherapy represents a necessity is when cancer has passed from the lymph nodes or breast to other parts of the body. This particular spread is known as metastatic breast cancer and it usually represents the ultimate and often lethal form of development.
Is the breast chemotherapy treatment effective or not? Can one tell without a doctor’s opinion? The efficiency of the treatment is not related to side effects: these adverse reactions appear whether the procedure works or not. This would be the wrong approach to it all. Adjuvant breast chemotherapy may have no side effects but the efficiency rate is often very positive in the sense that the spreading of the malevolent cells is stopped.
All in all, breast chemotherapy makes no easy treatment. It is probably the devastating treatment and the mutilation brought by breast cancer in itself that has increased awareness among women, making disease detection a lot easier and in the early stages of development.
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