As I understand, radiation therapy is basically directing highly concentrated x-rays/gamma radiation to kill tumors/cancer cells. I don’t quite get how, in this process of “shooting” high energy beams at the tumor, the skin/muscle cells don’t get damaged?
In: Biology
The cancer cell can normally regenerate less good compared to healthy cell. Therefore damaging the cancer cells with radiation will probably kill them, why the normal body cells can heal the damages.
If you use proton or ion beams you can even target quite exact in which depth you want to do damages, as high energy ions don’t do so much damage as low energy ones.
Therefore you can calculate how long the beam has to go through your body until it loses enough energy to cause strong damages. If you do it right you choose the initial energy and the kind of beam the way that most damages are only done the cancer cells and not so much to healthy cells.
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