Eli5 How does radiation therapy actually work? Like how doesnt it break down more of the body and make the cancer worse or something like that? And does it target only cancer area or everything?

Question

Eli5 How does radiation therapy actually work? Like how doesnt it break down more of the body and make the cancer worse or something like that? And does it target only cancer area or everything?

In: 630

Answer 1

The other responses have covered why radiation works against cancer cells, and does less damage to normal cells.

So I’ll mention a neat “trick” about radiation. Say i throw radiation through you, I’m essentially shooting particles at you. You’d think that anything in the path of my “bullet” would be disintegrated, right?

But really, the faster the bullet is travelling, the *less* likely it is to actually hit anything (but when it does, it packs more of a punch).

So you can play this to your advantage, and send the bullet at *just* the right speed that it misses most of the things in your body, until it happens to be right where you want it, and then it hits.

It’s not exact, but as mentioned with other comments, you take a lot of “good enough”s and add them together to get a “pretty decent”.