What is Surgical Oncology ?

Cancer and Surgery
Surgery, as some like to say, is a controlled trauma caused by a surgeon, in order to add years to life.
Surgery plays a very important role when in comes to cancer, in terms of diagnosis, cure, reconstruction and even salvage. Lets look into various aspects of surgery in cancer.

Surgery :

• oldest modality for treating cancer 
• widely used to treat solid tumors
• more patients are cured by surgery when used as a single treatment, as compared to any other type of cancer therapy. 

''Even in the contemporary cancer curing
multi-modality milieu, it is rare to find a patient with solid
tumor whose care does not include a surgical component''

Cancer Surgery

Principles of Surgery in Oncology:

• Zero-order kinetics - Surgery in oncology operates by Zero-order kinetics, where 100% tumor cells present in the operated area are killed or removed at once.
• Chemotherapy and Radiotherapy operate by First-order kinetics, where a fraction of tumor cells is killed at once.
• Surgery primarily reduces the 'tumor burden' and this helps the adjuvant therapies to kill the residual tumor cells.

For instance,  if there is a localized primary tumor, an en bloc surgical procedure can be performed to get rid of the gross and microscopic tumor in all the related and adjacent anatomic locations.

Surgery is the most effective treatment of localized primary
tumor disease and associated regional lymphatics.

Onco-Surgeon :

• The cancer surgeon  functions as a member of theoncology team, which includes a clinical oncologist, radiation oncologist, a nurse, care-giver, etc.
• The cancer surgeon is frequently the first oncology specialist that a patient will usually consult.

Role of a Surgeon :

• establish a diagnosis of a suspicious lesion
• make a surgical decision whether to operate or take other biopsy 
• secure the diagnostic-quality tumor tissue
• communicating the findings to the patient
• complete the procedures needed to stage the patient 
• initiate the interaction between patient and other members of the multi-modality oncology team
• initially explain to the patient the sequence and rationale of the various treatment components that will be used to manage their specific malignancy
• provides initial information about prognosis and make decisions about follow-up care and surveillance to detect tumor recurrence
• Present in the short as well as the long-term components of the disease process of a patient
• The cancer surgeon also holds the knowledge of different therapeutic options available, the natural course of the given malignancy, and how these factors will be integrated into sequencing the various treatment modalities, best suited for the patient.

In the succeeding article, know more about Biopsy .

Also read
5 reasons why you should study Oncology.
What is Radiation oncology?
What is Cancer-related fatigue?
What is psycho-oncology?
12 causes of cancer.
Cancer in 21st century.