Cancer strikes almost every family in the United States, so virtually everybody has had some contact with the disease. Most people know that surgery and chemotherapy are commonly used to treat cancer. And, in recent years, thanks to breakthroughs in immunotherapy, doctors are learning how to manipulate a patient's own immune system to defeat the disease. But cancer treatment increasingly relies on a combination of approaches, one of the most essential of which is radiation therapy. It is exquisitely targeted and works synergistically with other forms of treatment to shrink or eliminate tumors—but it gets very little press and too little funding.
Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, a German physicist, discovered X-rays in 1986, and the use of radium and low-voltage X-ray machines to treat cancer began shortly thereafter. Outside the medical profession, radiation therapy is perhaps the least understood intervention, although it has been around for more than a century and is widely used. About half of all cancer patients will receive radiation therapy at some point in their treatment, often as part of potentially curative therapy, and the rest to slow disease progression or for palliation of symptoms.
