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Radiation In Medicine

Radiation In Medicine

Radiation in medicine... This statement is still seems to be unreal for some people, though radiation therapy has existed for 100 years. Well, it is really not so easy for a common person to understand that radiation may help, if we know that it is one of the reasons of such horrible disease as cancer. And though there are people who refuse to do such a procedure, the conventional medicine still recommends this kind of therapy as one of the most effective for cancer treatment.

There are three divisions of radiation in medicine, such as external beam radiotherapy (EBRT or XBRT) or teletherapy, brachytherapy or sealed source radiotherapy and unsealed source radiotherapy. As you can realize from the names of these types of radiation therapies, they differ in relation to the position of the radiation source: outside the body or when the radioactive material is delivered internally.

It should be said that the dose of radiation depends on the state of health of the patient, the degree of success of the surgery, and whether the patient is receiving chemotherapy. Moreover, various countries have various measures of fractions (spreading out over time the total dose). Thus, in the US and Europe, the fractionation schedule is 1.8 to 2 Gy per day, five days a week. In the United Kingdom it is 2.67 to 2.75 Gy per day for adults and 1.5 to 1.7 Gy per day, for children. It should be noted that most part of the 2500 radiotherapy clinics are in the US.