Questions About Cancer Specialties
If you have cancer, most likely there are many health professionals involved in your care.

Rod Garman, RTT, manager of Radiation Oncology, and Lara Schmidt, RTT, prepare a patient for treatment using Ocean Medical Center’s state-of-the-art radiation equipment.

What Is Medical Oncology?
A medical oncologist often is the physician in charge of your overall treatment planning. He or she coordinates the treatment you receive from all of your specialists.

Medical oncologists use drug-therapy treatments to fight cancer, including:

• chemotherapy drugs, to destroy cancer cells



• hormone therapy, which uses synthetic hormones or other drugs to slow or stop the growth of certain kinds of cancer by blocking natural hormones



• biological therapy — or immunotherapy — to help your immune system fight the cancer, or to lessen the side effects of other cancer treatments

What Is Radiation Oncology?
Radiation oncologists use radiation to kill or damage cancer cells so they can’t grow or spread. Sometimes radiation therapy alone is enough to effectively treat cancer patients. "While each cancer treatment modality has much to offer, radiation is often used in conjunction with other treatments, like chemotherapy and surgery," states Barbara Rabinowitz, Ph.D., director of oncology services at Meridian Health.

There are different ways to give radiation therapy. Special machines can deliver high doses of radiation from outside the body. This is known as external beam radiation, and usually it is given over the course of several weeks. Patients usually have the treatments as outpatients at a hospital or other health care facility.

Using metal or plastic implants, doctors also can place radioactive material inside the body, in or near the tumor. With another kind of internal radiation therapy, patients take a radioactive substance by mouth or injection, and the material moves through the body.

What Is Cancer Surgery?
A cancer surgeon performs operations to diagnose and treat cancer.

There are many different types of cancer surgery, performed for different reasons. These procedures include:

• surgical biopsies, removing part or all of a tumor to determine whether it is cancerous



• staging surgery, finding how much disease is in the body and how far it has spread



• curative surgery, removing a tumor that has not spread to other areas. Sometimes cancer patients are treated only with surgery, but often surgery is done in conjunction with chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

Sometimes doctors can use minimally invasive techniques to diagnose and treat cancer. Because minimally invasive surgery is performed with small incisions, it offers many benefits for patients, including less pain, a shorter hospitalization, and a faster recovery.