Overview of Your Treatment Ch... Health Article

Researchers are continually finding new treatment methods for melanoma.

The choices that you have for treatment depend upon these factors.

• Size and location of the melanoma

• Extent of the disease, called the stage

• Status of your health

• Your age

• Your personal needs or special considerations

Treatment for melanoma can be either local or systemic. Local treatments remove, destroy, or control the cancer cells in one place. Surgery to remove a mole or a lymph node is an example of local treatment. Systemic treatments destroy or control cancer cells throughout the entire body. Whether you take it by mouth or injection, chemotherapy is a systemic treatment.

Types of Treatment

Depending on the stage of melanoma, you may have just one type of treatment or many of them. Different types of treatment have different goals. Here are some of the types of treatment for melanoma and their goals. They are listed in the order they are most commonly done.

• Surgery.  The goal of surgery is to completely remove the tumor on the skin, while leaving as much of the skin around it intact as possible. Surgical removal of the tumor provides the best hope for long-term survival. Your surgeon may also remove lymph nodes. Or you may need surgery to ease pressure or pain caused by cancer that has spread.

• Immunotherapy.  This type of treatment uses substances made in a lab that are also naturally made by your immune system. The substances work by boosting your body’s natural defenses against cancer.

• Radiation therapy. The goal of radiation is to kill cancer cells using high energy X-rays. For melanoma, you may have external radiation, which uses a machine to direct the X-rays to the skin area at or near the cancer.

• Chemotherapy. The goal of chemotherapy is to use drugs that kill tumor cells directly. Or it may be used to shrink tumors that the surgeon cannot remove or that have spread to distant spots of the body. You may take one drug at a time. Doctors call this single-agent chemotherapy. If you take more than one drug at a time, doctors call it combination chemotherapy. If you take chemotherapy and immunotherapy together, it’s called biochemotherapy.