Link to interesting article.
thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23918262-30000-cancer-patients-missing-out-on-radiotherapy.do
I think this came up a while ago on the BBC and some other sites, but it’s worth repeating. Even here, many people seem to regard the idea of radiotherapy with horror. Thanks for linking it.
Yes, radiotherapy can go wrong or be poorly administered, as can any medical treatment, but it is a very valuable treatment for many forms of BC. Having experienced both rads and chemo on different occasions, the rads were a doddle compared to chemo.
Some particular forms of radiotherapy are less pleasant than the ones we typically get, especially the ones for more systematic cancers which may involve ingesting radioactive substances. And just as with chemo, the administration of rads now is nothing like what it was in, for example, the post-war period.
Cheryl
Cheryl, I suspect that people underestimate the value of radiotherapy. I was looking on the Cancer Research Site, and it said that radiotherapy is in fact the only treatment that is actually capable of destroying cancer cells (apparently even at the very best chemo can only destroy up to 70%). I think the reason people have overlooked radiotherapy is that until recently most radiotherapy has been given palliatively (because conventional rads used at a curative dose can cause damage to healthy tissue). But with developments like Cyberknife Stereotactic Radiotherapy, TomoTherapy and SIRT, radiotherapy can now be given at a curative dose.
While radiotherapy will not cure metastatic cancer, it can certainly delay progression.
Also the possibility of having rads more than once on the same side which is what I had is I believe often overlooked. I was under the misapprehension that this was impossible but it was and I had it - they were able to target is so precisely that there was no overlap at all.