Advantages And Disadvantages Of Utilizing Nuclear Radiation For The Treatment Of A Brain Tumor

Research Question

What are the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing Nuclear radiation for the treatment of a brain tumor?

Background Information About Brain Tumors

A brain tumor is a group of abnormal cells that grow in or around the brain. Tumors can directly destroy healthy brain cells. They can also indirectly damage healthy cells by crowding other parts of the brain and cause inflammation, brain swelling and pressure within the skull.

Brain tumors are either malignant or benign. A malignant tumor, also called brain cancer, grows rapidly and often invades or crowd’s healthy areas of the brain. Benign brain tumors do not contain cancer cells and are usually slow-growing.

I chose to look further into brain tumor treatment through nuclear radiation because one of my relative’s suffered from it and decided not to get treatment.

Rationale

The claim I have chosen “The Benefits Of Using Nuclear Radiation In Medicine Outweigh The Risks” has many areas that can be investigated such as what type of radiation we’re talking about? what are we trying to treat? what risk may occur when in use and many more. When it comes to treating brain tumors there is a variety of treatment choices. These vary due to the size of the tumor, type of tumor, growth rate, location on the brain and the overall health of the patient. Treatment options include radiation therapy, chemotherapy (the use of anticancer drugs to destroy cancer cells), all these together and a few more options. When talking about the claim we are trying to figure out the advantages and disadvantages of the use of nuclear radiation for the treatment of brain tumors. So, we must discuss the multiple types of treatment weighing them against each other to find out if nuclear radiation in medicine is worth it.

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Analysis

Diagnostic information uses radiation to give analytic data about the functioning of an individual's organs or to treat them. Diagnostic techniques utilizing radioisotopes are now normal in today's world. Radioisotopes are radioactive isotopes of an element. They can also be defined as atoms that contain an unstable combination of neutrons and protons (www.ansto.gov.au). Over 40 million nuclear medicine operations are performed each year whilst the demand for radioisotopes increases by 5% every year. This is a sign of nuclear radiation medicine being the future of medicine but behind the scenes, there are a lot of disadvantages that come with using nuclear radiation in medicine.

Nuclear medicine provides functional and anatomic information about the anatomy of the patient's body. It offers the doctor the most useful diagnostic information to help determine the course the patient is taking and with the information received is so detailed it can also help the medical provider determine the state which the tumor is at. Nuclear medicine can also detect and determine the status of cancer letting the medical provider know if cancer has metastasized (spread to other places in the body) or remissioned (it’s manageable and is not getting any worse). This technology can also provide doctors reasons for unclear or abnormal lab results using a 3-phase body scan including MRI scan, x- rays and tomography. Which can evaluate were the bone pain is for patients, it can also detect cancer in bones which is helpful for older patients when they need help finding signs of osteoporosis. And there are many more advantages that I could list.

But of course, there always are some disadvantages. One is that the use of nuclear radiation medicine may badly affect any women who are in the phase of pregnancy or breastfeeding which will have a bad effect on the child the woman is carrying or feeding. There is also a threat of a severe allergic reaction that might have the patient experiencing dizziness, abnormal heart rhythms, dip in blood pressure and severe headaches. Although the odds of this happening are quite slim with 1 in every 40,000 patients reacting, it is still something to look out for. Another major downfall of using nuclear medicine is that it is very expensive without insurance or subsidies and because most of the patients aren't in a financial position to afford it. The main reason for nuclear medicine being so expensive is what it takes for the assembly, operations, and maintenance of the equipment being used. When medical facilities spend millions of dollars on these products, they are expecting some sort of way to recover that money and that’s when they charge patients a lot to money to conduct procedures with the equipment. I believe there is significant evidence to show that the advantages of using nuclear radiation in medicine outweigh the disadvantages. Although there are a few flaws when it comes to using nuclear radiation in medicine it can clearly be seen that the flaws listed aren’t as bad as the media portrays them to be while the advantages are clearly paving the way for the future of medicine. Going back to the claim “the benefits of using nuclear radiation in medicine outweigh the risks”. It is now clear that the benefits do outweigh the risks in most circumstances which helps justify the claim.

When it came to conducting research I easily found evidence to support my claim. With all the resources the internet I had a lot to choose from. Many resources resulted in many different points of view which made it harder for me to find the best possible opinion from a trusted source. But the more I looked the more reliable the sources would get resulting in me finding the information I have presented to you already. I know the sources I've used are reliable because the information is coming from professionals in their selected fields such as doctors, radiologists, and brain surgeons. Unfortunately, the only type of source I used for this assignment was websites limiting the information that I could have collected. If I had used books and other sources of information my view on this topic could have been changed.

A few things could've been improved to make the assessment better. Including a broader range of claims to suit everyone's liking instead of a small group of choices that minimise the potential of different types of research investigations. I could have made this investigation more insightful by looking at more sources and looking more into the negatives of using nuclear medicine so my report wouldn’t seem as biased.

The research question “What are the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing Nuclear radiation for the treatment of brain tumor?” could have been extended by taking a look into long term effects, how old are the people who use these resources, what health conditions do the patients have and many other factors could've been discussed to make the report more detailed and thorough.