Radiation therapy has been around since the beginning of the 20th century. The hospital Memorial Sloan Kettering was one of the first places to buy two x-ray machines because it knew that radiation could be used to treat cancer. This place was always on the cutting edge of new developments in radiation therapy. James Douglas also gave money to the hospital, which was used to pay for radiation therapy, which was the main focus of care. During this time, Benjamin Barringer was the first person to use radon-filled needles inserted through the perineum to treat prostate cancer. In the 1920s, Gioacchino Failla makes the first machine for radium therapy using an outside beam.
Before the X-ray machine was invented, the field of radiation health was called "health physics." But radiotherapy wasn't used as much as it could have been because cancer has a bad reputation. As a result, patients didn't have much access to the technology until the early 1980s, when the cost of radiotherapy dropped enough for it to be an effective way to treat patients. Until that point, most of the history of radiation therapy technology was based on what happened at the AERI. After that, however, the field grew and spread far beyond the institute's walls.
In the early 1900s, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered X-rays and radioactivity. These discoveries made ionizing radiation an essential therapeutic tool. Earlier research showed that it could be used for healthy and sick people. At the Paris Congress of Oncology in 1922, Henri Coutard showed proof that fractionated radiotherapy could be used.
Radiation therapy has become safer and more effective as it has grown over the past few decades. Doctors now use it to treat skin cancer and other types of skin cancer. It's a great way to treat cancer; it works well and is safe at all stages of the disease. If you are thinking about getting radiation therapy, it is essential to know how it has been used in the past.
Radiation was found a little more than a hundred years ago, and it has hugely affected science, medicine, and business. When reliable x-ray tubes were made, surgeons could treat tumors less than 2 cm from the skin's surface. But the highest dose stayed on the skin and caused redness and sores. To deal with these problems, surgeons at the beginning of the 20th century turned to Marie and Pierre Curie, who found a way to make x-rays with more power.
Proton therapy is the type of radiation therapy that is the most accurate and effective right now. In the 1950s, protons were first found and used. Since then, the field of radiation oncology has come a long way. By the end of the 20th century, cyclotrons and other types of radiation therapy could be used regularly in medicine.
3-D conformal radiation therapy plans the treatment area with the help of a computer program. The computer also simulates the treatment area and guides the radiation beams to cancer. This lets doctors give a tumor a higher radiation dose without hurting nearby healthy tissues. Of course, patients must be closely watched during treatment to ensure they don't get sick from the radiation. But some people are more likely to get cancer than others. Because of this, treatment plans need to be made for each person.
FLASH-RT is another new way to treat people. This method quickly moves from the lab bench to the patient's bedside. It can reduce the radiation to healthy tissues and help the patient handle it better. Even though this isn't the primary way that radiation therapy is done, it is a promising alternative to the way that radiotherapy is usually done.