Learn more about the topic of chemotherapy side effects
Together with AIDS, cancer is the lethal threat of the 20th century. Lots of people have become direct or indirect victims to this illness, either by suffering from the condition or by having someone dear to them devastated by tumor development. Knowing what cancer patients go through during chemotherapy is very difficult but reading about it may shed a bit of light on how to help and comfort these patients. To start with, chemotherapy side effects are aspects that patients dread most.
There are very numerous side effects, and their extent and intensity vary according to the length of the treatment and the type of drugs involved. Most chemotherapy side effects are temporary and they decrease in intensity and eventually stop after a certain period of time. It seldom happens for some adverse reactions to persist for several years after the cessation of the treatment.
If you were interested in finding out more about the chemotherapy side effects of various treatments or combinations of drugs, you should know that there are a great deal of sources providing you with relevant information helpful in alleviating and understanding the pain the patient goes through. The list with potential chemotherapy side effects is about 200 items long and it includes such effects as abdominal pain, dizziness, nausea, chills, cardio-toxicity, edema, eye problems, lack of appetite, weight gain or loss, memory loss, leukemia, infections of various types in various parts of the body, nose bleeds, pulmonary embolus, pneumonia, rapid heartbeat, water retention, and so on. Going through such a list will surely turn out quite discouraging but you ought to know that these chemotherapy side effects will not appear all at once and in the same patient. They are each specific to a certain type of cancer and are definitely related to the type of drug or combination of drugs that the doctor has recommended as treatment.
Normally, patients should be informed by their doctors on the possible chemotherapy side effects and their persistence at the end of the treatment. Explaining what the patient will go through constitutes an essential preparatory stage as this will avoid having the patient panic about something that is usually associated with certain drugs. Most often, doctors come up with several treatment schemes and present their to their patients with the pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages.
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Article Source: HealthSnare.com
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Dr. Bill Ackart
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Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 Time: 10:42 AM
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