How Is Head and Neck Cancer Treated?
How Is Head and Neck Cancer Treated? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Once a patient is diagnosed with head and neck cancer, what are their treatment options? Dr. Jessica Geiger provides an overview of current therapies.
Dr. Jessica Geiger is a medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic. Learn more about Dr. Geiger.
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
How is head and neck cancer treated?
Dr. Jessica Geiger:
The thing about head and neck cancer is even if it’s a very early-stage cancer, certainly if it’s a later stage with very big tumors that have spread, even the small cancers are often treated with many different modalities, many different medical specialties and surgical specialties. So, primarily, it’s going to be treated with head and neck surgery, sometimes with radiation, and then of course, you can require some systemic therapy which is what I do. And systemic therapy could be standard chemotherapy as you think about it. It could be targeted therapy. It could even be immunotherapy.
Katherine Banwell:
Okay.
Dr. Jessica Geiger:
And sometimes we have to use two or three of those different tools to get the job done.
