Skin Cancer Treatment
There are three primary kinds of treatments your healthcare professional may use to treat your actinic keratoses (precancerous lesions) or your skin cancer:
Surgery, which is removing the cancer
Chemotherapy, which uses drugs to kill cancer cells
Radiation Therapy, which uses x-rays to kill cancer cells Most often, your healthcare professional will choose surgery. Common types of skin cancer surgery techniques include:
- Cryosurgery freezes the tumour, which kills it.
- Electrodesiccation uses an electric current to dehydrate the tumour so that your healthcare professional can use a special surgical tool to remove it.
- Simple excision cuts the cancer from the skin along with some of the healthy tissue around it.
- Micrographic surgery removes the cancer and as little normal tissue as possible. Your healthcare professional then uses a microscope to look at the area to make sure no cancer cells remain.
- Laser surgery uses a highly focused beam of light to destroy only the cancer cells.
Surgery may scar your skin, so sometimes skin is taken from another part of your body and grafted over the area where the cancer was removed.
Chemotherapy can be a topical cream or lotion placed on the skin to kill cancer cells, an orally ingested drug, or a drug that is injected into a vein or muscle. Radiation therapy shrinks tumours with x-rays aimed at the affected area from outside the body.