Diabetes nutrition — Make restaurant meals a healthy part of your diabetes meal plan.
For some people, eating out is an occasional indulgence. For others, it's a way of life. Either way, moderate portions and careful choices can help you make restaurant meals part of your overall plan for diabetes nutrition.
Chemotherapy can serve varying goals
One of chemotherapy's main advantages is that — unlike radiation, which treats only the area of the body exposed to the radiation — chemotherapy treats the entire body. As a result, any cells that may have broken away from the original cancer are treated.
Depending on what type of cancer you have and whether it has spread, your doctor may use chemotherapy to:
- Eliminate all cancer cells in your body, even when cancer is widespread
- Prolong your life by controlling cancer growth and spread
- Relieve symptoms and enhance your quality of life
In some cases, chemotherapy may be the only treatment you need. More often, it's used in conjunction with other treatments, such as surgery, radiation or a bone marrow transplant, to improve results. For example, you may receive:
- Chemotherapy before other treatments (neoadjuvant chemotherapy). The goal of neoadjuvant therapy is to reduce the size of a tumor before surgery or radiation therapy.
- Chemotherapy after other treatments (adjuvant chemotherapy). Given after surgery or radiation, the goal of adjuvant therapy is to eliminate any cancer cells that might linger in your body after earlier treatments.
How chemotherapy is given
You usually receive chemotherapy in cycles, depending on your condition and which drugs are used. Cycles may include taking the drugs daily, weekly or monthly for a few months or several months, with a recovery period after each treatment. Recovery periods allow time for your body to rest and produce new, healthy cells.
Chemotherapy drugs can be taken in a number of forms. Your doctor decides what form or forms to use primarily based on what type of cancer you have and what drug or combination of drugs will best treat your cancer. Examples of different forms of chemotherapy include:
- Intravenous (IV). Chemotherapy is injected into a vein, using a needle inserted through your skin. This allows rapid distribution of the chemotherapy throughout your entire body.
- Oral. You swallow this form of chemotherapy as a pill.
- Topical. This type of drug is applied to your skin to treat localized skin cancers.
- Injection. Using a needle, your doctor injects the drug directly into a muscle, under your skin or into a cancerous area on your skin.
Chemotherapy medications, regardless of how they're given, generally travel in your bloodstream and throughout your entire body. The intravenous route is the most common, allowing chemotherapy drugs to spread quickly through your system. In cases in which your doctor wants to direct chemotherapy to a more confined area — for example, to ensure a tumor is exposed to more of the drug — he or she may insert a tube (catheter) directly into that area or into a blood vessel supplying the tumor.
Last Updated: 11/07/2006
