Colon Cancer Often Has Silent Symptoms — Here’s What to Watch For

Colon Cancer Treatment

Treating colon cancer highly depends on each patient, the stage of the disease, and their health parameters. They are divided into two different groups: local and systemic therapy. Local therapy is confined to a single area of the body and does not involve the rest. An example would be surgery and radiation. In contrast, systemic therapy covers the whole body at the same time and includes chemotherapy. Depending on your stage of cancer you might get one of the approaches or a combination of both.

During a colonoscopy, any suspicious polyp can be removed, and this is a polypectomy. On the other hand, a colectomy and a colostomy are both advanced types of surgery performed by a specialist to remove the affected part of the intestine.

Radiation therapy uses X-rays to destroy cancer cells, and it is commonly used along with surgery or chemotherapy to guarantee the best results by killing the remaining cells in the area. On the other hand, chemotherapy is a systemic therapy that involves a drug traveling throughout the body and killing cells with an accelerated replication. It is commonly used before performing surgery to shrink the tumor, and it is an important part of the treatment of stage 4 cancer.