Review
Here is what we have learned from Overview and Surgery:
Any treatment that is given to modify, control, remove or
destroy primary or metastatic cancer tissue is considered
to be cancer directed treatment. Non-cancer directed treatment
refers to any treatment or procudure designed to diagnose
or stage the disease, prepare the patient for cancer-directed
treatment, prolong a patient's life, alleviate pain, or make
the patient comfortable.
First course of treatment includes all methods of treatment
recorded in the treatment plan and administered to the patient
before disease progression or recurrence.
Surgery is the oldest form of treatment for cancer.
Ancient Egyptians first conducted medical operations with
very primitive surgical tools such as knives, drills, saws,
hooks, forceps, and pinchers, some of which, modified somewhat,
are still used for surgical purpose today.
New, improved, and more effective surgical tools include
laser and radiation (gamma knife).
Diagnostic surgery involves physically removing a sample
of a suspected tumor and examining this material under a microscope
so that a definite diagnosis can be made. This procedure is
called biopsy.
Types of biopsies include excisional biopsy, incisional biopsy,
endoscopic biopsy, colposcopic biopsy, bone marrow biopsy,
fine needle aspiration biopsy, and core biopsy. Refer to "All
About Biopsies" for more details.
Curative surgeries take a much more radical surgical approach,
partially or totally removing the organ of origin. In addition
to excisional surgeries where more traditional surgical tools
such as scalpels are used, modern surgical tools include laser
(laser surgery), high-frequency electrical currents (electrosurgery),
and radiation (gamma knife), even liquid nitrogen (cryosurgery).
In preventive surgery, the surgeon removes tissue that does
not yet contain cancer cells, but has the probability of becoming
cancerous in the future. Oophrectomy (removal of both ovaries)
is one of the examples of preventive surgery against ovarian
cancer.
Palliative surgery is performed to make the patient's life
as comfortable as possible or to prolong the patient's life
when the disease is not responsive to any type of curative
treatment.
Finally, reconstructive surgery may be performed to repair
the damage caused by the cancer or the curative surgery as
well as to improve functions of certain anatomic parts of
the body.
Quiz
It's time to see how much you have learned from this unit.
A multiple-choice type of quiz, including ten questions, has
been created to give you an opportunity to reinforce what
you have learned.
Since the quiz is created as an incentive for learning, rather
than an objective evaluation of learning results, the score
of the quiz will not be captured and will not be recorded.
Feedback to your answer is provided in real-time, instantaneously,
so you may select another choice if your first choice is not
the correct one.
These quiz questions are grouped into five sets of two questions
each to reduce the size of the content on each page. When
you finish the questions in one set, click the navigation
arrows in the Title Bar to go to the next page. Please click
here to take the quiz.
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