Lung cancer: treatment
Every cancer is different. The best treatment depends on lots of things, including the type of lung cancer you have, how big it is, where it is, and your age and state of health. This is something you need to talk about with your doctor.
The main treatments are surgery, radiotherapy (X-ray treatment) and chemotherapy (drug treatment). Sometimes 2 or even 3 of these treatments are used for the same cancer.
Surgery
This involves cutting out the part of the lung where the cancer is. Sometimes a whole lung has to be removed. It's a major operation, done under a general anaesthetic so that you're unconscious while it's happening, and you need to stay in hospital to recover. Not every person with lung cancer can have this kind of surgery because of the lung damage caused by smoking, such as with emphysema.
Radiotherapy
Radiotherapy uses high-energy X-rays to kill the cancer cells. It can cure some early lung cancers, before they've spread far, it can shrink tumours, and it can relieve pain and other symptoms when the cancer can't be cured. The X-rays are carefully aimed at the cancer so they won't harm healthy cells. The treatment is often given in several sessions over a number of weeks, and to make sure that the X-rays are aimed at exactly the right place each time, the person doing it (called a radiation therapist) marks your skin as a guide to where the rays should go.
Radiotherapy doesn't hurt. It doesn't make you radioactive either, but you may feel tired, and you may get marks on your skin like sunburn.
Chemotherapy
This is treatment with anti-cancer drugs. The drugs are usually either injected or given through a catheter, a thin tube put into a large vein. The drugs can affect the healthy cells in your body as well as cancer cells (although they have a bigger effect on the cancer cells). So they may have side effects such as making you feel sick. Or your hair might fall out – this is because the drugs work best on cells that are growing quickly. (It's because cancer cells are growing quickly, and won't stop growing, that they're a problem – but hair is always growing too.) Your hair will grow back, and the other side effects usually disappear after the treatment stops. In the meantime, there are things your doctor can do to help you with side effects.
For further information and advice, call the Cancer Helpline on 13 11 20.
Last Reviewed: 03 January 2002
