Standard Skin Cancer Treatments

[Steive]

The National Cancer Institute recommends 5 different types of standard skin cancer treatments:

Surgery
Radiation therapy
Chemotherapy
Photodynamic therapy (a cancer treatment that uses a drug and a certain type of laser light to kill cancer cells)
Biologic therapy (a treatment that uses the patient’s immune system to fight cancer)
The difficulty is that most of these therapies actually damage the patient’s immune system!

[suruchipurimake]

Chemotherapy for nonmelanoma skin cancer and actinic keratosis is usually topical (applied to the skin in a cream or lotion). The way the chemotherapy is given depends on the condition being treated. Retinoids (drugs related to vitamin A) are sometimes used to treat squamous cell carcinoma of the skin.