Radiation therapy is a large part of todays medical treatments for cancer, most people will know someone that has experienced radiation therapy and may be affected by it. Radiation therapy is the repeated process and and dosage of energy high radiation beams that is enough that it can cause ionizing of cancer cells subsequently killing them. There are two main ways in which radiation can be delivered to the cancer cells and that is external beam radiation and internal radiation, this article will be focusing upon the usage of external beam radiation, the history of radiation therapy, how this technology works, the roles it plays in the treatment of cancer, the risks and side effects of such a process and comparing this technology to other alternatives…show more content… Radiation therapy is one of the most common treatments for cancer. When a cancerous tumor forms it is malignant, meaning it can spread and invade the surrounding nearby tissue, cancer cells can sometimes break off from the original tumor and travel through the blood or the lymph system and form new tumors a fair distance from where It began. The human body contains trillions of cells, most cells in the body grow and divide to form new cells, however cancer cells grow and divide quicker than most of the normal cells surrounding it. Radiation was discovered over 100 years ago and today more than half of all people with cancer will get radiation treatment as apart of their cancer treatment. To understand how radiation works as a treatment for cancer it helps to know the growth life of a normal cell in the body. The cell has 5 phases to it, one of which is the cell splitting. When a cell divides into two identical cells it is called mitosis. The process of the 5 phases of cell life is controlled by proteins called cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs). Because CDKs are so important to cell division they have a number of control
