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Conventional therapies that treat Mesothelioma

‘Mesothelioma’ that word in itself conjures up so many horrors associated with it. Devastating, painful, depressing, terrible, awful, bloated, fatigue, hopeless, agonizing and several other similar words emanate from the affected mesotheliomic patients.

For those who are unaware as to what is Mesothelioma, it will be sufficient for them to know that it is basically an unusual type of malignancy, a cancer that affects the thin fragile covering of internal organs, mainly lungs, stomach and the heart.

The person develops this disease when he/she has worked in a place that is filled with asbestos material or fibers. There is no successful cure for this fatal disease. However patients in order to lessen their suffering and prolong their life usually go for the following conventional therapies.

RADIATION THERAPY

Once a person becomes mesotheliomic, then he/she has to often go for radiation therapy, in which radiation is in the form of beams that are transmitted and target specifically the cancerous cells to reduce its size substantially. Because prolonged radiation in itself can cause cancer, therefore radiation treatment is done with extreme care and caution.

Special care is taken that the neighboring healthy cells and tissues remain undamaged. The patients are called for repeated and limited sessions. The sessions usually last from 1-5 minutes. It is highly effective when it comes to destroying mesotheliomic cells and shrinking the size of the malignant tumors.

A mesotheliomic patient will experience quite a few side effects due to radiation therapy such as loss of appetite, anxiety, depression, hair loss, nausea, low blood count, fatigue, diarrhea, mouth sores and skin problems.

CHEMOTHERAPY

In chemotherapy, the mesotheliomic patient is given a concoction of drugs and medication to kill the cancerous cells or to limit their growth to other areas of the body. This is done because cancerous cells have a tendency to multiply really fast and it is imperative that their rapid growth is inhibited as much as possible.

This drugs combination is given by injecting it into the blood of the cancer patient. This drug combination can also do away with healthy cells therefore the cancer specialists have to inject such a combination which can kill as many cancerous cells as possible and fewer healthy cells.

Chemotherapy often leads to a lot of side effects that are quite similar to radiation therapy. Those side effects are hair loss, queasiness, runny motions, likeliness of falling sicker due to low levels of immunity and even fertility is affected.

SURGERY

Surgical removal of the linings of the affected organs or removal of the organ itself is also performed on mesotheliomic patients. The surgeon may remove the mesotheliomic lung, the pleura, diaphragm or the pericardium. However surgery is only done if the mesothelioma is in its beginning stage and the patient is able to climb up and down the stairs without running out of breath.

Radiation therapy, chemotherapy, surgery are usually used in a combination to treat the mesothelioma affected patients. It is all dependent on the stages of mesothelioma that a patient has.