Cancer is Not Just One Disease!
A few months ago, Dr. Mohammad Jahanzeb, medical director of Sylvester at Deerfield Beach and an expert in breast and lung cancers, spoke to chapter officers of The Pap Corps at their monthly Presidents’ Breakfast. In his opening remarks he explained that although the word cancer is used generically as a single disease, cancer is actually many diseases! Simply defined, cancer is abnormal accumulation of dysfunctional cells in one of two ways: by uncontrollable cell division that results in invasion of healthy tissue, either directly or by spreading through the blood stream or lymphatic system; or by cells evading programmed death.
There are perhaps hundreds of different cancers. All cancers begin in cells, the body’s basic unit of life, and are named for the organ or type of cell in which they start. The name of the cancer remains the same regardless of its spread to new organs or tissue. Researchers and doctors try to outsmart cancer at many levels, but it adjusts and continues to outsmart them by changing its composition and spreading from one part of the body to another, a process known as metastasis.
“Cancer” is perhaps as broad a term as “infection.” We all know there are many categories of infection: viral, bacterial, fungal, etc. The treatment of infectious diseases, however, is more advanced than cancer treatment. In the case of infection, doctors are dealing with known organisms that differ in some respect from human cells, so they can design a drug to attack some non-human attribute of the organism to cure the infection. Cancer cells, however, are human cells that are most prominently different from normal cells in their rate of cell division. Chemotherapy, which attacks the rapid cell division mechanism, kills not only the diseased cells but other rapidly-dividing cells that are normal. That is why patients can lose their hair, develop sore mouth, diarrhea and a drop in their blood count as all of these cells that normally divide rapidly in our bodies are affected.
Because cancer treatment involves many different treatments such as surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy at the same time, it takes a team approach to arrest it. This multi-disciplinary approach is used at Sylvester at Deerfield Beach, which offers patients new programs and state-of-the-art options. The facility has a team of more than thirty cancer specialists offering multi-disciplinary cancer care in 14 of Sylvester’s site disease groups.
Bone and Soft Tissue Cancers- Breast Cancer
- Colorectal Cancer
- Eye Cancer
- Gynecologic Cancer
- Head and Neck Cancer
- Leukemia, Lymphoma and Myeloma
- Lung Cancer
- Melanoma and Related Skin Cancers
- Neurological Cancer
- Pancreatic, Liver and Related Cancers
- Prostate, Bladder and Kidney Cancers
- Stomach and Esophageal Cancers
- Thyroid and Other Endocrine Cancers
“We are virtually creating a new facility,” says Dr. Jahanzeb, “where patients in our area can have access to more physicians armed with the full Sylvester arsenal of cancer-fighting weapons. We have a newly-created Radiation Oncology Center under the direction of Dr. Laura Freedman. Sylvester’s experts have embraced new technology that works to precisely target cancer cells while sparing the healthy cells as much as possible.”
Providing cutting-edge radiation services for cancer patients in the Deerfield Beach area “further enhances Sylvester’s ability to provide novel approaches not available anywhere else,” explains Dr. Alan Pollack, professor and chairman of radiation oncology. The Deerfield Beach facility offers a new Radiation Oncology Center, a new Women’s Center, and a full suite of imaging services to be used for all types of cancer. The new linear accelerator has On-Board® Imaging capabilities for daily tumor localization, as well as RapidArc® for more rapid delivery of radiation.
To learn more about the programs and services offered at Sylvester at Deerfield Beach, or to schedule an appointment, call 954-571-0111 or toll free at 800-545-2292. Also, please visit www.sylvester.org and www.papcorps.org.
