Anna Winship about Brachytherapy

http://www.aboutbrachytherapy.com Dr. Anna Winship, Consultant Oncologist at Guy's and St. Thomas Hospital, London, UK, talks about the key benefits of Brachytherapy during the ESTRO Anniversary Congress in London, May 2011. For more information, please visit www.aboutbrachytherapy.com Many patients have heard about people having surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but brachytherapy they may not have heard of. For us in a cancer centre it's a very common and well established treatment. So we try and provide as much information before the patient comes to us. Once they've seen us, seen the team and quite often seen the treatment room, they're usually reassured. Many patients that are having brachytherapy have far fewer treatments than if they were having the equivalent dose with external beam radiotherapy, and obviously when hospitals may be a little way away, it means less travelling time. And actually the treatments normally don't take very long. So there are many advantages to the patient, as we know how difficult it is for so of them to travel and how it can affect their quality of life. A brachytherapy procedure means inserting a tube into the area we want to treat. So that could be under local anaesthetic, or under general anaesthetic, or with no anaesthetic at all. So if we were giving treatment following surgery for endometrial cancer, we would place a small tube into the vagina and that would be under no anaesthetic. Once that's done, the most important thing is that the patient has some imaging so we know exactly where the applicator is and the area we want to treat. So once the patients had their imaging then we are able to, once they have left the department, for us to plan the treatment. That means they could come back for the actual treatment itself on a subsequent day, which would only take a few minutes. Many of my patients ask if there's anywhere else they can find out more about brachytherapy apart from what we give them, so I do recommend that they look on the internet, and one of the sites that I do recommend is aboutbrachytherapy.com, because that might help.