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. Various kinds of breast chemotherapy can be identified depending on the drug combination chosen by the doctor. 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 passes in the blood and then travels through the whole system attacking cells with a rapid growth rate. 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 consider breast chemotherapy a systemic treatment precisely because its effects are extended to the entire body structure.
Breast chemotherapy may be recommended after lumpectomy or mastectomy 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 represents a necessity is when cancer has passed to other parts of the body starting from the lymph nodes. This particular cancer invasion bears the name of metastatic breast cancer and women rarely have this form at the time of the diagnosis.
Is the breast chemotherapy treatment effective or not? Can one tell without a doctor's opinion? The efficiency of the treatment is not related to side effects: these adverse reactions appear whether the procedure works or not. This would be the wrong approach to it all. Adjuvant breast chemotherapy could show no side effects but the efficiency rate is often very positive in the sense that the spreading of the malevolent cells is stopped.
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.
