One of the very last words that anyone wants to hear coming from their doctors or loved ones is ‘cancer’. The word cancer automatically installs fear in a person, confusion, and the thought of “why me?”. It has such an overpowering way of controlling ones life. Cancer is a disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body. With more than two hundred types of cancer that can affect more than sixty organs, while killing 500,000 people annually in the United States alone(4). It is understandable why cancer has such a bad reputation. Although there is no cure for cancer, doctors and researchers have come up with many types of treatments for it. One is being Radiation Therapy which is the treatment of cancer using X-rays and similar forms of radiation.
Radiation therapy is given with curative intent, with the hope that the treatment will cure a cancer, either by eliminating a tumor, preventing cancer recurrence, or both. It kills cancer cells by damaging their DNA. Once the DNA is damaged beyond repair the cells stop dividing or die, then are broken down and eliminated by the body’s natural processes. The goal of radiation treatment is to damage cancer cells, with as little harm as possibly to nearby healthy tissue. (1)…show more content… There is an external-beam radiation method which is directed from a machine outside the body onto cancerous cells inside the body(5). This form of therapy is most often delivered in the form of photon beams with either X-rays or gamma rays. Patients usually receive therapy in daily treatment sessions over the course of several weeks. Many types of external-beam radiation therapy are delivered using a machine called a linear accelerator. This machine uses electricity to form a stream of fast moving subatomic particles that creates high-energy radiation that is used to treat cancer.
