Breast chemotherapy refers to the treatment applied to patients who suffer from breast cancer. Its purpose is to kill or to reduce in size the tumor consisting of cells that multiply very quickly compared to the normal rate of multiplication of normal cells. Breast chemotherapy can be of very many kinds depending on the combination of drugs that the doctor has selected for you. That is why it is highly important that patients and their family ask for clarifications from their doctors in case they haven’t understood how it all works and that they also know what side effects may be expected as a result of the medication.
There are two ways of administering breast chemotherapy: orally in cycles established by the doctor or intravenously. The drug reaches in the blood and then travels through the entire body to locate and attack the sick cells meant to be destroyed. Even though breast chemotherapy is directed at breast cancer, the drugs that are recommended as treatment may act on whatever other unhealthy cells that may have already developed somewhere else than the breast. From this perspective doctors call breast chemotherapy a systemic treatment precisely because its effects are extended to the entire body structure.
Breast chemotherapy may be recommended after mastectomy or lumpectomy and in this case it is known as adjuvant treatment. The treatment is possible in this form only when medical tests indicate that the cancer is limited to the breast area only.
Another case when breast chemotherapy becomes necessary is when cancer has spread from the lymph nodes or breast to other parts of the body. This particular cancer invasion bears the name of metastatic breast cancer and women rarely have this form at the time of the diagnosis.
Whichever of the breast chemotherapy treatments you are to receive it is important to know how you can figure out if it has any effect. This does not mean however that it is mandatory for you to experience side effects or otherwise your treatment is inefficient. Such an investigation approach is totally incorrect. Adjuvant breast chemotherapy may have no side effects but it has always proved to be very helpful as it impedes unhealthy cells from spreading or redeveloping in your body.
All in all, breast chemotherapy is no easy treatment. It is probably the devastating treatment and the mutilation brought by breast cancer in itself that has increased awareness among women, making disease detection a lot easier and in the early stages of development.
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