Eli5: Why cyberknife treatment is less popular than surgery for treatment of cancers yet it carries less risks.
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“CyberKnife” is a marketing term. What it really means is a robot blasting your crotch with radiation.
People are afraid of both robots and radiation, especially since radiation can have nasty effects years after the exposure. Moreover, if a firm that bothered to come up with a catchy-but-misleading name for its device, it might be hiding something.
I haven’t had cyberknife, but I have had proton beam radiation. “Cancer” is really a fairly broad term—you can have a small and low to intermediate-risk tumor, like I did, to a late-stage, large one, basically anywhere in the body.
A lot of the time, it’s recommended to use multiple methods of treatment, like both surgery and radiation. Type of tumor affects what helps. For example, the type I have shows no benefit from chemo. Certain tumors don’t show as much improvement with these beams. A lot of research is still going. It’s also, of course, a lot harder when the tumor has metastasized.
Then there’s cost and availability. Cyberknife is even newer and finer than proton beam—an already-more-difficult-to-access treatment. I traveled ten hours from home for mine. And, of course, there’s insurance coverage, which in many people’s cases, is a main issue.
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