Working within the medical sector or the medical part of the technology sector makes one, in very various degrees, connected or close to illnesses, injuries and diseases of different kinds. The people choosing to work within the medical sector ideally have a vision of making every patient that they meet as good and healthy as possible, to treat the patient the most possible and hopefully one day make the patient fully recover and healthy. Many illnesses and diseases we can today not only treat but enterilly fight them until the patient is no longer sick. Taking viruses as an example, whereas many of the viruses that before posed a life-threat upon every child being born, and are today easily avoidable by vaccination.
This is to the extent that many viruses are today more or less described as extinct. Other illnesses can make one quite sick but is then easily treated with a dose or course of treatment with antibiotics. By no means all, but still many of the viruses and bacterias that we before feared are now easily combatable. The same is sadly not to be said about cancer in its various forms – which is still a complex disease hard to predict. It is always hard to predict how the cancer will act, how the treatment and medications will work and how the body will react. Treatments of cancer have long been something of finding the best solutions in a complex case. In order to combat the tumours of cancer you need to kill the cancer cells in the tumours, usually by chemotherapy or radiation, and it is hard not to damage the surrounding tissue.
This is an imperfect case that is of course in constant development and the methods have become more safe for every year. Nowadays classical radiation therapy will in many cases be replaced by tomotherapy which is a radiation method in which the surrounding tissue is successfully not exposed to more radiation than necessary for the treatment. The principle is a circulathing method where only one area of surrounding tissue is exposed at the same time. This reduces the risk of one area being too damaged. Another method that has been developed is vmat – short for volumetric modulated arc therapy. The common idea of these methods is to divide the dose of radiation as much as possible and keep the surrounding tissue healthy. Read more about treatment here.