subject: Standard Medical Treatments For Breast Lumps [print this page] Breast cancer medication keeps changing every day. Each and every new invention in this field typically signifies a ray of hope for the hundreds of thousands of people who have to go through the agony of losing a breast or both to the condition. At times, this amounts to loss of lives. If you are suffering from breast pain or have breast lumps it is important that you seek out medical opinion soon. Nowadays, there are five common breast cancer treatment options used by doctors. They consist of radio therapy, hormone therapy, targetted therapy, surgery and chemotherapy. Nevertheless, there are some other kinds of treatment options in clinical trial stages. Some include things like sentinel lymph-node biopsy and stem cell transplant, which should be preceded by excessive dosages of radiation treatment. Surgery is always the first option for breast cancer. Physicians perform a lumpectomy to eradicate the breast lump or tumor that is triggering your breast pain and also surrounding tissue or partial mastectomy by which a part of the cancerous breast and unaffected tissue adjacent it is cut off. Samples of the nymph nodes are removed from the underarm to see if the cancer is malignant. Removal of the entire breast is called total mastectomy. The removal of the breast, lymph nodes and some chest wall muscles is referred to as modified radical mastectomy and this usually happens when the cancer has progressed. Taking out all the lymph nodes and more chest wall muscles is referred to as radical mastectomy, in a way similar to modified radical mastectomy. Commonly, surgery is accompanied by hormone therapy, chemotherapy or radiotherapy so that any remaining cancer cells will be killed. A common cancer treatment is radiation therapy which uses high energy x-rays to kill cancerous cells and slow their growth. This can be done two ways - externally administered whereby radiation is directed at the cancerous tissues or internally whereby radioactive substances are fed via catheters, needles or tubes. Radiation is placed near or directly into the cancer. Your medical specialist will make the choice of treatment methods depending on the seriousness of the breast cancer and it's current stage. Chemotherapy as a treatment option for breast cancer involves using drugs to prevent the cancer cells from developing or dividing and spreading. In systemic chemotherapy, the drugs can either be injected into the blood stream or taken orally. In regional chemotherapy however, the drugs are placed directly on the body cavity, spinal column or the affected organ. As with radiation therapy, the treatment with regards to chemotherapy will depend primarily on how bad the the cancer is and at what stage it is in In hormone therapy, specific hormones are removed from the body or their functions blocked to try and stop the cancerous cells from maturing. One such treatment option is ovarian ablation which prevents the ovaries from making estrogen. Other hormone therapy treatment methods have tamoxifen and aromatose inhibitors. Using drugs that identify and attack cancerous cells only without damaging normal cells is called targetted therapy. Two common drugs for targetted therapy include Tyrosine-Kinase inhibitors and monoclonal antibodies. No matter the type of breast cancer treatment that is used on a person, consistent medical screening will be important in the future in order to assess whether the cancer treatments managed to get rid of the disease permanently.
