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Cornerstone of Cancer Treatment

41 views · Published 6 November 2015 · 1:54 · Indexed 29 October 2026

Channel: Lee Health · 2015 · Science & Technology

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A cornerstone of cancer care, radiation targets deviant cells and obliterates them. For decades the fundamentals remained the same, but the tools have vastly improved.

“Our field is constantly changing, and I would say that if you compare radiation to how it was even a couple of decades ago, it’s in some ways not really comparable,” says radiation oncologist with Lee Memorial Health System, Dr. Arie Dosoretz. 
Nowadays radiation oncology is focused on precision, making it a technology-driven field.
“When we do our planning for our radiation, we’re not just looking in one plane or another plane, we’re looking in every dimension and we can literally rotate a model of a patient’s body in a computer and we can tell the treatment machines that we want to put radiation in this place and even a centimeter away we want almost no radiation at all,” says Dr. Dosoretz. 
Offered locally, stereotactic radiotherapy is a good example. Doctors pinpoint high doses of radiation, without harming healthy tissue nearby. It’s made a positive impact on malignancies, including early stage lung cancer.
“Stage one lung cancer involves small nodules in the lung. And we know that if we can get a big dose of radiation to these spots we have a much better chance of controlling them. We’re able to treat these lesions somewhere between three to five treatments to the lung and spare virtually all normal tissue,” says Dr. Dosoretz. 

Going smaller can be smarter in many ways. Patients have a limit to radiation exposure. Fewer applications that are fine-tuned give doctors room to come back again if needed, giving patients additional options for future recurrence.

“If we are thinking about doing radiation again, we want as little tissue at the beginning that we treated. Meaning that we have more room to play with the second time around,” says Dr. Dosoretz. 

A time-test treatment, radiation oncology is changing with the times. 

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Lee Memorial Health System in Fort Myers, FL is the largest network of medical care facilities in Southwest Florida and is highly respected for its expertise, innovation and quality of care. For nearly a century, we’ve been providing our community with everything from primary care treatment to highly specialized care services and robotic assisted surgeries.

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