What is Radiation Therapy?

Radiation therapy is usually a “regional” treatment. It often falls in between surgery and chemotherapy in multidisciplinary treatment of cancer. Surgery typically focuses on “the tumor” and chemotherapy often focuses on the “whole body”. Radiation is often given to the “tumor bed” (where the tumor was) and the lymph node basins at highest risk for “microscopic disease” – disease that cannot be seen or felt by the surgeon during surgery or found by the pathologist under the microscope, but is almost certainly there. Radiation is very effective at sterilizing this “microscopic disease”.