Cancer (Part III)

When Marie Curie and Pierre Curie discovered radiation at the end of the 19th century, they stumbled upon the first effective non-surgical cancer treatment. With radiation came also the first signs of multi-disciplinary approaches to cancer treatment. The surgeon was no longer operating in isolation, but worked together with hospital radiologists to help patients. The complications in communication this brought, along with the necessity of the patient's treatment in a hospital facility rather than at home, also created a parallel process of compiling patient data into hospital files, which in turn led to the first statistical patient studies.
Cancer patient treatment and studies were restricted to individual physicians' practices until World War II, when medical research centers discovered that there were large international differences in disease incidence. This insight drove national public health bodies to make it possible to compile health data across practises and hospitals, a process that many countries do today. The Japanese medical community observed that the bone marrow of bomb victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was completely destroyed. They concluded that diseased bone marrow could also be destroyed with radiation, and this led to the discovery of bone marrow transplants for leukemia. Since WWII, trends in cancer treatment are to improve on a micro-level the existing treatment methods, standardize them, and globalize them as a way to find cures through epidemiology and international partnerships.
The following closely related terms may be used to designate abnormal growths:
• Neoplasia and neoplasm are the scientific designations for cancerous diseases. This group contains a large number of different diseases. Neoplasms can be benign or malignant.
• Cancer is a widely used word that is usually understood as synonymous with malignant neoplasm. It is occasionally used instead of carcinoma, a sub-group of malignant neoplasms. Because of its overwhelming popularity relative to 'neoplasia', it is used frequently instead of 'neoplasia', even by scientists and physicians, especially when discussing neoplastic diseases as a group.
• Tumor in medical language simply means swelling or lump, either neoplastic, inflammatory or other. In common language, however, it is synonymous with 'neoplasm', either benign or malignant. This is inaccurate since some neoplasms usually do not form tumors, for example leukemia or carcinoma in situ.
• Paraneoplasia is a disturbance associated with a neoplasm but not related to the invasion of the primary or a secondary (metastatic) tumour. Disturbances can be hormonal, neurological, hematological, biochemical or otherwise clinical.