What is chemotherapy?
Although the word chemotherapy can mean the use of any drug (such as aspirin or penicillin) to treat any disease, to most people the term chemotherapy refers to drugs used for cancer treatment. Two other medical terms often used to describe cancer chemotherapy are antineoplastic (meaning anti-cancer) therapy and cytotoxic (cell-killing) therapy. History of chemotherapy The first drug used for cancer chemotherapy did not start out as a medicine. Mustard gas was used as a chemical warfare agent during World War I and was studied further during World War II. During a military operation in World War II, a group of people were accidentally exposed to mustard gas and were later found to have very low white blood cell counts. Doctors reasoned that an agent that damaged the rapidly growing white blood cells might have a similar effect on cancer. Therefore, in the 1940s, several patients with advanced lymphomas (cancers of certain white blood cells) were given the drug by vein, rather than by b
Since cancer is a word used to describe many different diseases, there is no one type of treatment that is used universally. Chemotherapy is used for a variety of purposes: • To cure a specific cancer; • To control tumor growth when cure is not possible; • To shrink tumors before surgery or radiation therapy; • To relieve symptoms (such as pain); and • To destroy microscopic cancer cells that may be present after the known tumor is removed by surgery (called adjuvant therapy). Adjuvant therapy is given to prevent a possible cancer reoccurrence.
