However, there are still many situations when cancer tumours can't be operated because they are too deep in the organ and removing it will permanently damage the respective organ, so the result will be pretty much bad for the patient. But at least this field of activity has progressed a lot and now there are very sophisticated machineries that allow doctors to get to very difficult tumours that were inoperable and untreatable not long before. One of these revolutionary methods is the photon beam therapy that is used in treating cancer. It is a kind of radiation therapy that reaches deep tumours with high energy X-rays made by a linear accelerator.
The photons are the particles that deliver energy in any device that uses electromagnetic radiation beams. This radiatiob beam can be of many different types, like: X rays, gamma radiation, light or microwave. The beam is more powerful if it contains more photons with more energy.
The devices used in the radiotherapy process are called linear accelerator radiotherapy machines and they use cobalt, a very radioactive metal to create the photon beam that is used for treating cancer patients. These machines can be set up to produce the kind of radiation the doctors need for treating a patient with cancer. For example low energy photon beams are used for treating the disease outside the body, like skin cancer or melanoma as it is called, whereas the tumours that are deep inside the body are treated with high energy photon beams.
This way the tumour is bombarded with photon beams and is irradiated directly on its surface without affecting the neighbouring organs. Irradiation therapy is known to produce a shrinking in the size of the tumour and even make it disappear after the treatment is finished and if the cancer is not so widely spread.
Even if radiotherapy is used for a long time now, it wasn't very successful in the past, as the morbidity was very high and the organs around the affected tissue was also irradiated during treatment. Now the devices providing this photon beam are a lot more accurate and target the cancer cells directly, avoiding all the possible damage to other tissues. So it seems to be more precise and a lot more effective these days.
But , of course, these devices providing the photon bea treatment are really expensive and very few hospitals can afford them and they also need specially trained people to use them, as they require extreme precision and knowledge to be operated. So we can only hope that in the near future every sick person will afford a treatment with such a device.