Being a doctor isn't the easiest job in the world. One of the foremost tenets of the job is to provide the patient the treatment and/or cure that can increase his or her lifespan even if he or she is faced with a serious disease such as cancer.
They are so bent in achieving this objective that many of them end up doing treatments that are actually less effective or don't have any significant benefit simply because they're afraid they might be shortchanging their patient if they forgo with it.
This is the result of a study conducted among hundreds of breast cancer patients. The findings, which you can already read in the recent issue of cancer, concluded that although chemotherapy and radiation therapy are two of the most common forms of treatments provided to these patients, radiation therapy, for one, may not be worth it considering the small benefits it gives to the patient but the big risks he or she has to go through.
The research team behind the study came from Duke University Medical Center. For this, they used the data published in 2004 from a random trial conducted to elderly women who were diagnosed with the early stages of breast cancer. The types of information they were zooming in were those that pertained to the impact of the treatments these patients received. They compared the data between cancer recurrence and survival of those with surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation and women who had chemotherapy and surgery, with no radiation.
The chances of recurrence among women with all three treatments are slightly higher than those with only two; however, there's not much difference in terms of survival (wherein the patient lived for 5 years or more). In other words, radiation didn't have a huge impact on the patient's survival.
The researchers then recommend eliminating radiation from the treatment protocol as the risks may only outweigh the benefits.
