You may have heard of interventional therapy and read about it often in magazines. However, most people may not really understand what it means. So, what kind of treatment technique is interventional therapy and how do doctors operate it? Here are some of the secrets. What does interventional therapy mean? As we know, surgical treatment is done after surgical exposure; medical treatment is done by taking medication. Interventional treatment, however, is not like the kind of exposure and open surgery that opens up the human body, and at the same time, it is not a kind of surgery that relies on drugs to treat. It is somewhere in between, so more doctors are used to calling interventional therapy “surgery without surgery”. Interventional therapy is an emerging treatment method between surgery and medical treatment, including intravascular and non-vascular interventions. After more than 30 years of development, it has now become one of the three pillar disciplines along with surgery and internal medicine. In simple terms, interventional therapy is the least invasive treatment method to treat the lesion locally under the guidance of imaging equipment (angiography, fluoroscopy, CT, MRI, ultrasound) without opening the lesion and exposing it through a tiny channel of a few millimeters in diameter in a blood vessel or skin, or through the body’s original pipeline. Interventional therapy is a method of treatment in which different drugs are injected directly into the lesion via blood vessels or skin puncture to alter the blood supply to the lesion or to act directly on the lesion. For example, for tumor treatment, drugs can be injected directly into the mass to “starve (block tumor blood vessels) + kill (high concentration of anti-cancer drugs)” the tumor cells. For thrombus, it can “crush thrombus + dissolve thrombus”. Secondly, interventions can also place different materials and devices in blood vessels or other ducts in the body (bile duct, esophagus, intestines, trachea) to restore the normal function of these ducts. Placement in the blood vessels restores blood flow, placement in the bile ducts reduces bile accumulation in the liver, placement in the esophagus improves eating, placement in the intestinal ducts restores digestion in the intestines, and placement in the trachea improves breathing.