Radiation Therapy Specialties

When one reads about radiation therapy in the news, the first instinct is to think “women, breast cancer, and radiation treatment”. But not all radiation treatment is geared towards women and women alone. Men and children also suffer from cancers that must be treated with radiation. Therefore, it’s important when considering a career in Radiation Therapy that you take the time to consider the type of patients you’d like to work with and if you’d serve those patients better by specializing in a specific field of study.

Radiation therapists can specialize in the type of cancer they treat, thus ensuring their patients receive the utmost care, empathy, and treatment. But in order to specialize, one must learn more than just medical procedures; one must understand what each type of cancer does to the patient’s physical, mental, and spiritual being. Only then can the therapist truly help the patient.

If you are considering specializing based on a “type” of cancer, here’s a short list to start with:

• Bladder cancer
  
• Bone cancer
  
• Brain cancer
  
• Breast cancer
  
• Lung cancer
  
• Ovarian cancer
  
• Prostate cancer
  
• Skin cancer
  

Once you know the type of cancer you’d like to help treat, take the time to get to know how that cancer affects the daily lives of your patients, only then will you be able to truly help them heal and move forward with their lives.

Come back on Monday to learn more about IAMP and its programs.