Nursing-Approach to Cancer Care

Nursing-Approach to Cancer Care

Introduction

Cancer is the name given to a disease caused by the degenerative disorder faced by the central nervous system. This disease mostly turns out to be very severe and ultimately causes death. Cancer patients need intensive care as they suffer through severe physical pain. There are many treatments for cancer but those treatments are also very painful. So, it is very necessary to treat cancer patients with special care.

Discussion

Diagnosis of Cancer

There is no specific test to accurately diagnose is disease of cancer. For complete diagnosis of cancer patients, a through history and physical examination is highly required. In order to determine that a person has cancer or not, there are a number of tests. These tests help on determining that either that person is suffering through cancer disease of there is some sort of infection that is producing symptoms same as cancer.

For confirming or eliminating the presence of disease, effective diagnostic testing is performed. In that testing the disease process is monitored and further it is planned and evaluated the effectiveness of the treatment. In some cases when the condition of a patient is changed or the test sample collected is not of good quality or when the results of any abnormal test has to be verified. For cancer, diagnostic procedures involve laboratory tests, genetic testing, imaging, surgery, endoscopic examination and biopsy.

Staging of Cancer

Severity of a person's cancer is analyzed by staging. It is based on the extent of the cancer that either it is in initial stage or it has spread in the body. There are several reasons for which staging is considered to be very important:

It helps the doctor in planning the most appropriate treatment.

It helps in estimating the persons' prognosis.

Awareness of actual state helps in identifying clinical trials suitable for a specific patient.

It helps researchers as well as health care providers in exchanging information relevant to patient's condition. It also offers general terminology to evaluate the results based on clinical trials and performing the comparison of the results of various trials.

The progress of cancer in a person's body is evaluated with the help of the knowledge of staging. The most critical problem of this disease is that, cells and tissues of cancer grow and divide in the body without any control. When the growth of these tissues becomes out of control and they do not die, ten they form tumor. The growing tumor is then invaded by nearby organs and tissues. As they move through lymphatic system or bloodstream, these cancer cells spread from the primary site to other organs or lymph nodes where new tumors are formed. The spread of cancer is termed as metastasis.

Side effects of cancer treatment

Radiotherapy is a cancer treatment in which cancers issues are burnt with the help of radioactive rays. This treatment also has side effects as this radiation sometimes increases the production of cancer cells.

Pain is also caused in cancer treatment which sometimes turns out to be very ...