Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Why it's done
By Mayo Clinic staffAbout half of all people with cancer receive radiation therapy as part of their cancer treatment. Doctors use radiation therapy to treat just about every type of cancer. Radiation therapy is also useful in treating some noncancerous (benign) tumors.
How radiation therapy is used in people with cancer
Your doctor may suggest radiation therapy as an option at different times during your cancer treatment and for different reasons, including:
- As the only (primary) treatment for cancer
- Before surgery, to shrink a cancerous tumor (neoadjuvant therapy)
- After surgery, to stop the growth of any remaining cancer cells (adjuvant therapy)
- In combination with other treatments, such as chemotherapy, to destroy cancer cells
- In advanced cancer to alleviate symptoms caused by the cancer
- Radiation therapy and you: Support for people with cancer. National Cancer Institute. http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/radiation-therapy-and-you/allpages. Accessed May 4, 2009.
- External beam therapy (EBT). Radiology Info. http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=ebt. Accessed May 4, 2009.
- Part II: Radiation therapy - Your personal experience. Cancer.Net. http://www.cancer.net/patient/Library/Cancer.Net+Features/Treatments%2C+Tests%2C+and+Procedures/Part+II%3A+Radiation+Therapy%26mdash%3BYour+Personal+Experience. Accessed May 4, 2009.
- What to expect. RT Answers. http://www.rtanswers.org/treatment/what_to_expect.htm. Accessed May 4, 2009.
