What are the treatments for lung cancer?

For the treatment of lung cancer, the treatment plan needs to be selected based on the patient's physical condition and disease. Common methods for treating lung cancer include surgical treatment, chemotherapy, and important treatment. Regardless of the treatment method, patients should face it with a positive attitude.

1. Surgical treatment

The treatment of lung cancer should be based on surgery or strive for surgery except for stages IIIb and IV, and combined treatment with radiotherapy, chemotherapy and immunotherapy should be added according to different stages and pathological tissue types.

Regarding the survival period after lung cancer surgery, domestic reports have shown that the three-year survival rate is about 40% to 60%; the five-year survival rate is about 22% to 44%; and the surgical mortality rate is below 3%.

2. Chemotherapy

The best treatment for inoperable lung cancer is chemotherapy. In recent years, "chemotherapy" has often been included as a systemic treatment in the comprehensive treatment plan for lung cancer. It is currently recognized that chemotherapy should be the first choice except for a few patients with sufficient evidence showing no intrathoracic lymph node metastasis. Chemotherapy will inhibit the bone marrow hematopoietic system, mainly the decrease of white blood cells and platelets, thereby inhibiting the unlimited proliferation and metastasis of cancer cells and other terrible pathological changes. Clinically, chemotherapy is divided into chemotherapy for small cell lung cancer and chemotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer according to the different types of lung cancer. Although there are many effective drugs for non-small cell lung cancer, their efficacy is low and complete remission is rarely achieved.

3. Radiation therapy

Radiotherapy is best for small cell carcinoma, second for squamous cell carcinoma, and worst for adenocarcinoma. However, small cell carcinoma is prone to metastasis, so large-area irregular field irradiation is often used. The irradiation area should include the primary lesion, the bilateral supraclavicular areas of the mediastinum, and even the liver and brain, and should be supplemented with drug treatment. Squamous cell carcinoma is moderately sensitive to radiation. The lesions are mainly local invasion and metastasis is relatively slow, so radical treatment is often used. Adenocarcinoma has poor sensitivity to radiation and is prone to blood metastasis, so radiotherapy alone is rarely used.

4. Treatment with traditional Chinese medicine

This disease belongs to the category of "lung accumulation" in clinical Chinese medicine. It is mainly believed that it is due to the deficiency of vital energy, imbalance of yin and yang, and the six evils taking advantage of the opportunity to enter the lungs and stagnate in the lungs, leading to lung dysfunction, stagnation of lung qi, dysfunction of qi movement, obstruction of blood circulation, failure of body fluid to be transported and distributed, and body fluid gathers into phlegm, phlegm condenses and qi stagnates, and blood stasis blocks the collaterals, so phlegm, qi, blood stasis and toxicity are glued together and form lung masses over time. Therefore, lung cancer is a disease that is systemic in nature and local in nature. The most common deficiency types of lung cancer are yin deficiency and qi-yin deficiency; in fact, they are nothing more than pathological changes of qi stagnation, blood stasis, phlegm coagulation and toxic accumulation.