This book is intended as a basic overview of the drug treatment
of cancer for junior doctors and specialist nurses who come into
contact with people having chemotherapy as part of their day-today
work. The aim is to provide a context to those treatments,
explaining what the drugs are, how they work, some of their
more likely side effects, how they are used in the treatment of
the commoner cancers and what therapeutic results might be
expected.
The first use of the word chemotherapy is credited to Paul
Ehrlich (1854–1915), who used it to describe the arsenical
compounds he developed to treat syphilis. Nowadays when people
talk about ‘chemotherapy’, as part of cancer treatment, they are
usually referring to the use of cytotoxic drugs. Cytotoxics have
dominated systemic cancer therapy for the last 50 years, and their
use has resulted in enormous improvements in outcome. But they
are only one component of the drug treatment of malignancy.
Hormonal therapies are another major contributor to increased
cure rates and survival times, and the last decade has seen an
explosion of entirely new types of drugs for cancer treatment.
The latter are mainly drugs specifically targeted against cancer
cells (whereas cytotoxics affect both normal and malignant cells).
These newer compounds have sometimes been popularly termed
‘magic bullets’, which again takes us back to Ehrlich, as this was
another phrase he used to describe his treatments.
The aim of this text is to cover all these different elements of
systemic therapy, giving an explanation of their various modes of
action, their side effects and their place in the everyday treatment
of common cancers, with the hope of offering a simple overview
of an increasingly complex, diverse, and incredibly exciting area
of modern-day medicine.
link download
http://www.ziddu.com/download/3600526/CancerChemotherapyinClinicalPractice.pdf.html
