Cancer is a terrifying condition for a whole number of reasons. It’s deadly, it can remain hidden for years, even the smallest instance can kill you, even if you beat it once it can come back and lastly, the treatment is often worse than the disease itself. Due to the massive prominence of cancer worldwide and the fact it kills so very man people every single year, a lot of money and man hours are put into researching the condition.
Generally radiation therapies are used to treat cancer. Essentially radiation tells the cells in your body to stop splitting, and then it tells them to start again. Ideally the cancerous cells won’t be told to start reproducing again and as such the cancers spread will be prevented and it may go into remission. This is a traumatising experience for the whole body and causes nausea, weakness, fatigue and complete hair loss.
The problem with most radiation therapy is that the radiation has a habit of spilling beyond the point it’s aimed at and doing collateral damage to your body. It’s a volatile thing. Doctors use beta particles traditionally but several new studies have looked into the use of much more potent alpha particles which could be much better at killing off the cancerous tissues in the body. The issue is targeting these particles as any spillage beyond the target area could be catastrophic for the rest of the body, much more so than the beta particles.
Time will tell if doctors can achieve the necessary level of safety to put this treatment into effect. If they do it could begin a whole new era of much more effective cancer treatments, providing lessened morality rates and a better standard of therapy for people all over the world today. Here’s to hoping!
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