Chapters Transcript Video The Evolution of Cancer Treatments Rod L. Flynn, MD, discusses the multiple modalities that treat cancer and how they are evolving to improve patient care. well I've always believed and I was taught this in my training that the treatment of cancer is more than just one bullet. There are multiple modalities that we have to use to take care of a majority of these solid organ malignancies that we take care of. And I feel that as surgical techniques are improving, we're also getting a lot of help from our medical and radiation oncology colleagues for example, there are new techniques of determining what is the best modality of treating patients from the systemic route. And so we talk about genomic profiling and genomic testing so we can treat patients in a more focused and targeted way. So that's one way. And so as opposed to always giving the what we call side of toxic chemotherapy, there are now biological therapies, immuno therapies and other therapies that we can give uh systemically to help patients into sometimes even make our surgery easier. Obviously, also from the surgical standpoint, there are more minimally invasive techniques as well as our abilities to do a better job with the standard techniques for very advanced cancers. And then finally from the medical standpoint radiation there, the radiation techniques of delivery are much more advanced now. And in addition there are other techniques locally, such as proton therapy that could be used adjunctive lee to the standard photon treatment. There are also inter operative options for patients as well. So I think from the main three uh subspecialties if you will within the oncology field surgical oncology, Medical oncology and radiation oncology uh we have newer and growing techniques that when used synergistically we can achieve a lot better outcomes for patients. Published August 17, 2021 Created by Related Presenters Rod Flynn, MD Surgical Oncology View full profile
