Should I have chemotherapy if I have lung cancer?

Lung cancer is a common disease, and when it is diagnosed, the chance of surgery is often lost. In clinical practice, we often encounter patients who come to our hospital with cough, blood in sputum, dyspnea, chest pain, etc. repeatedly untreated, and are diagnosed as lung cancer through fibrinoscopy, lung biopsy, sputum examination, etc. At this time, the disease is often advanced, and many patients or their family members, knowing that the disease cannot be completely cured by surgery, are often disillusioned, unwilling to accept even chemotherapy, and give up treatment and go home. As doctors, this is the most painful time, and they often have a dry mouth to explain in order to save lives. In terms of pathology, lung cancer can be divided into small cell lung cancer and non-small cell lung cancer. In the past two decades, chemotherapy for lung cancer has taken on an increasingly important role in treatment. For example, once small cell lung cancer is detected, 90% of patients have local or systemic metastases, and its chemotherapy efficiency reaches 80-90%, which is already a tumor curable by radical chemotherapy, which is very encouraging; patients with non-small cell lung cancer who can be operated are lucky, but unfortunately, the percentage of early diagnosis is not high, and chemotherapy can Chemotherapy can increase the feasibility of surgery and postoperative survival, and the new drugs developed in recent years have also greatly improved the efficiency, and then through the integrated treatment of radiotherapy, biological therapy and Chinese medicine can improve the quality of survival and prolong the survival of patients. After three courses of chemotherapy with MVP and NP, the lung masses and enlarged mediastinal lymph nodes disappeared completely, and now he is still as loud as a bell, not like a lung cancer patient. “Tumor-free survival” is the standard of modern medicine to cure tumor, but even if the tumor cells are killed 99.9%, clinically reached “complete remission”, but the tumor cells still remain in the body, the tumor may recur after a period of time. Therefore, the pursuit of “tumor-free survival” is unnecessary and unrealistic, thus turning to “survival with tumor” the improvement of the quality of survival under the famous oncologist Sun Yan pointed out: “People are no longer satisfied with the situation that the tumor is cured and the patient becomes crippled or seriously dysfunctional and thus lives a miserable life. ‘The phenomenon that the disease is cured and the person is disabled’ can no longer continue” This view also supports the “survival with tumor” of tumor. Thirty years ago, the side effects of chemotherapy for tumors were great, chemotherapy means that you can not eat, vomiting, hair loss, the end of chemotherapy the whole person almost out of shape, with the update of the concept of chemotherapy, adjuvant drugs, lung cancer chemotherapy is now almost in the case of senseless, painless. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has included improving the quality of survival and prolonging the survival time of tumor patients as an important indicator in the evaluation criteria of tumor efficacy, and chemotherapy is sure to relieve the symptoms and prolong the survival of lung cancer patients. So, is chemotherapy very expensive? The three regimens listed in the article cost about $1,500, $2,500 and $3,000 per course, respectively, but the value of the treatment is self-explanatory. The treatment of lung cancer is not endless anymore. Nowadays, the view is that 3-6 courses of chemotherapy combined with other comprehensive treatments can bring patients a disease-free survival with high quality of life and enjoy life.