When signs or symptoms which may indicate the presence of a bone cancer (like the unexplainable pain in the bone) appear, a medical check up becomes imperative.
The presence of the pain does not always mean that the person has bone cancer because the most frequent pain appears as a result of trauma or arthritis and most of the times the benign tumors in the bone are pain free.
Still the only way of determining whether there is a danger of cancer present is for the doctors to examine the tissue sample.
The radiotherapy is generally associated with the bone cancer. The radiation exposure during radiography does not harm the patient but high dosage of radiation like the radiotherapy administrated in the treatment of other cancers increases the risk of developing bone cancer especially by the young patients.
Fortunately the radiotherapy has become more and more sophisticated, a thing that determines the reduction of the secondary effect of this type of cancer treatment.
For example today, the doctors are able to monitor and dose the radiation and direct them exactly and only on the area that requires them.
Radiotherapy is more precisely the cancer treatment done with beams of high energy called gamma or X-ray radiations.
Although the radiations can modify the healthy cells in the mean time they are very dangerous for the cancer cells, the healthy cells being able to get well after the radiation session.
Many bone cancer patients are put through radiotherapy and their doctors suggest that the method should be used at different times during the treatment for different reasons like before the surgical intervention done to remove the tumor or for stopping the cancer cell growth.
Radiotherapy is often used in cooperation with chemotherapy but in the case of the bone cancer cells the associations is not always recommendable.
Chemotherapy uses drugs that are able to destroy the cells which are dividing too fast. These cells include the cancer cells which are multiplying to the detriment of the healthy cells and in the case of bone cancer the result may be unexpected, the chemotherapy destroying in the same time the contaminated cells near the tumor. This way the healthy cells find it very hard to heal post chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy addresses the whole system not just the area and that makes it a bit volatile in the case of bone cancer.
The recent studies have shown that especially for the older patients the radiotherapy has presented better results than the chemotherapy.
