Radiotherapy

Treatment options both for patients who have had surgery and those for which surgery is not an option nearly always includes chemotherapy and radiotherapy. This treatment mode uses radiation to kill cancerous cells; it is perhaps the oldest non-surgical treatment for malignancy in Western medicine. Radiation can be effective in killing cancer cells but it is not a very precise technology, so the radiation beams tend to kill healthy cells adjacent to the malignant cells on which it is targeted.