• Question: How does chemotherapy work?

    Asked by edrienepadua to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 23 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 23 Jun 2013:

      As I understand it, chemotherapy is quite a crude treatment – it’s basically a cocktail of quite poisonous chemicals and the idea is that they kill off your tumour (cancer) cells before they kill you. Once the tumour cells have died you stop the chemo and your body gradually recovers… But chemo is not very good for you and makes you feel rubbish, but it’s used because it can be a really effective way of removing remaining cancer cells after surgery and preventing the cancer coming back or reducing tumour size to relieve symptoms .

      Hopefully soon there’ll be better treatments, but for now it’s still one of the best treatments we have.

    • Photo: Steven Gardner

      Steven Gardner answered on 24 Jun 2013:

      I think chemotherapy works by killing cells that are dividing. It’s more effective therfore against cells that are dividing more often, like cancer cells and hair folicles (which is why chemo makes your hair fall out).

      As Christina says, chemotherapy is quite crude, it’s basically like carpet bombing the body and hoping the cancer dies first (my medical physics lecturer often said killing the cancer is easy, the difficult bit is keeping the patient alive). It can be really effective though and has saved many lives.

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