what is cancer?

Cancer

One out of every two men and one out of every three women will be diagnosed with invasive cancer in their lifetime. For this reason, it's really important to know more about what cancer is, what makes it up, and how it's treated. At the simplest level, cancer or cancer cells are cells that have lost the ability to follow the normal control that the body exerts on all cells. In our body, we have billions of cells that have different functions. It's a very complicated process under incredibly phenomenal control, and if something goes wrong and that control is lost, and particular cells escape the normal control mechanisms, they continue to grow and may spread; that's called cancer. As those cells grow and divide, they turn into a mass or they clump together, and that's what would be called a tumor. Then they can get smart and spread to other places, and that's called metastasis. Cancer can actually occur anywhere in the body because there are cells everywhere in the body. In women, one of the most common cancers is breast cancer. In men, prostate cancer and in both men and women, lung cancer and colon cancer are common cancers. One of the things we're now learning is that just because you have breast cancer doesn't mean that your breast cancer is the same as the person that's sitting next to you who may have breast cancer, and therefore you can get an individual treatment plan that's based on you as an individual and your particular cancer type. Once the diagnosis of cancer is made, the next obvious question is what you do. There are several things that are really relevant to the stage of cancer.

• Which is information about where the cancer is?
• You say it's a particular kind of cancer. How much cancer is present?
• Has it spread yet?
• Is it in the lymph nodes?
• Has it spread to other organs in the body?

Cancer treatment is actually very complex, which is due in part to the fact that cancer is a constellation of over 200 different diseases. have some common characteristics, but they're all very different from each other. In addition to that, cancer itself is not homogeneous. There may be three or four or five or six different slight variations in the cancer cells that are there. People ask, "Why, why does my cancer not go away? It shrunk by seventy percent." It's probably a different subtype of that cancer that is going to require a different kind of treatment.

Treatment of cancer

Cancer treatment methods include surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Surgery is when you literally remove cancer. You make an incision, you find cancer, and you cut it out. Radiation is actually taking what we call photons, the same thing that you use to take an x-ray picture in order to treat a focal area of cancer. Chemotherapy is using a drug or chemical that's either taken by mouth as a pill or given through an IV into the veins to target those cells that are dividing more quickly. Receiving a diagnosis of cancer can be a frightening thing. The good news is that today is probably the most exciting time in history in terms of the treatment of cancer. Options that didn't exist a few months ago certainly didn't exist a few years ago. The ability to genomically profile a tumor and to take that individualized fingerprint of that cancer may direct us to tailor treatment in very specific ways.

As we learn more about genetic abnormalities in individual cancers, we're able to more effectively target those abnormalities for individual cancer, not only to improve the outcome for the patients relative to cancer but also hopefully result in fewer side effects because the targets will hopefully be less in the normal tissue and more in cancer itself. New drugs have now been designed to teach the immune system. The cancer cells are what they are, so the immune system can actually do the job of killing off those cells. We've unlocked a key interaction in how cancer cells and immune cells interact, and by affecting that interaction, we teach the immune cell to be smarter and see the cancer cell for what it is and get rid of it.

At Cancer Treatment Centers of America, we have a very robust, integrative oncology program. Integrative oncology means taking those conventional oncology treatments and integrating them with therapies like acupuncture, naturopathic medicine, and chiropractic, as well as nutrition, to blend them together and create the most appropriate treatment plan for that individual patient at that moment in time. So, having your symptoms and side effects under control and having your nutritional status and immune system as well as your energy supported during treatment better positions you to fight cancer and tolerate the treatment course.

Cancer Treatment Centers of America have all their resources under one roof. All of these team members really try to address any sort of side effects or symptoms that you may be having before they occur. If we can keep your body strong, if we can keep your hope up, and you feeling strong emotionally, and if we can keep your immune system in a good place, you're going to tolerate the treatment much better. No matter what cancer you have, this is a person who has a life and family and friends and so forth, and so my goal as an oncologist is to not only get rid of cancer but to then live a normal life again. I've been an oncologist now for over 30 years and the options for treatment are the best that I've ever seen them. They're more effective with fewer side effects and faster recovery so that you can live a normal life as long as you can. We've never had better opportunities than we do today.