Based on your breast cancer stage, your doctors will advice you the alternative breast cancer treatment options. Normally, the standard treatment options are including radiation, hormone therapy, chemotherapy and surgery. If your breast cancer stage is at DCIS or LCIS, which is the lowest stage, then your cancer treatment journey will be much easier.

Mastectomy or breast-conserving surgery with or without hormone therapy and radiation are choices of breast cancer treatment options if you have been diagnosed with DCIS. Whereby LCIS breast cancer treatment options includes bilateral prophylactic (preventive) mastectomies or hormone therapy to prevent cancer from developing.

Cancer treatment will be getting difficult when encounter the cancer spreads beyond the lobules or ducts. For IBC, the cancer treatment options normally including chemotherapy due to its aggressiveness.

Typically, the conventional breast cancer treatment methods includes:-

Chemotherapy

As per definition at Wikipedia, chemotherapy is a disease treatment with use of chemical substances to treat disease. Nowadays, chemotherapy is a common terminology referring to cytotoxic drugs used in cancer treatment.

Most of people been heard those stories about how weakening after performed chemotherapy. Anyhow, you are able to do your daily activities if you have the right management tools towards the chemo’s side effects.

Actually, chemo is a means of treating cancer systemically and it’s normally a cancer treatment option for the cancer has been spread to lymph nodes or those whose tumor is larger than a certain size

Breast Cancer Surgery

Breast surgery is either remove tumor (a lumpectomy), partial or modify radical mastectomy. Normally radiation is the next action after a lumpectomy. With a lumpectomy, you can keep your breast and there is no difference in survival rates between lumpectomy and mastectomy based on studies.

Those days, the breast, all the lymph nodes and the underlying muscle would cut away when perform radical mastectomies. However, with the new technology currently, it is possible to remove a portion of the lymph nodes.

Hormone Therapy

Most breast cancers are hormone-dependent. In those cancers, there are receptors on the tumor can be filled with estrogen. It is so-called estrogen-receptor positive (ER) when estrogen fills with these receptors and causes the tumor to grow.

It is based on your menopausal status before the doctor recommends you any hormone therapy drug as these cancers respond well to hormone therapy.

Radiation Therapy

Normally, radiation therapy is a cancer treatment for about six weeks with five days per week. Cancer cells are very rapid dividers. Therefore, radiation is a recommendation as it is a localized treatment option where rapidly dividing cells are damaged. This therapy method is very much like lying stills for an x-ray and last a couple of minutes. Hence, it can cause a sunburn effect on skin, and fatigue.

Keep in mind that breast cancer does not define you. If you have been diagnosed breast cancer, you should treat it as a speed bump in the course of your life and look for cancer treatment suitable for your cancer stage aggressively.

Related posts:

  1. Natural Breast Cancer Treatment Vs Conventional Treatment

Filed under: Breast Cancer Treatment

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!