- Hello, my name is Keyosha Gaines with Nashville General Hospital.

On today's "For Your Good Health," we're going to talk about cancer treatments and cancer tests.

(gentle music) There are a multitude of ways that we diagnose and treat cancers.

Some of those ways can be blood tests.

We looking for levels of cancer in your blood.

Imaging tests are CTs, MRIs, or PET scans.

And the purpose of these are to look at cancer inside of your body.

Endoscopy is when they put a little camera down your throat or sometimes up your rectum, and what they're doing is looking at the internal structures of those organs with a little scope that has a light on it with a camera.

A biopsy is when they take a piece of tissue, and they send it off, and see what is inside of this tissue.

Are their cancer cells in the biopsy?

Cytology is when they use urine, or pee, stool, spit, and they send it off and look at it under a microscope to see if there are any cancer cells in the specimen.

The most common type of treatment is definitely chemotherapy, and that can look like chemotherapy before surgery, which is when we give it to shrink the cancer before you go to surgery, or it can be chemotherapy after you've had your surgery.

Chemotherapy can be administered orally, which can be a pill that you take every day or twice a day.

It depends on your treatment regimen.

Or chemotherapy can be infused through an IV, where you will come in and an IV will be started after we look at your blood test to make sure that it is safe for you to have your treatment.

Radiation is also a mainstay of cancer treatments, and it can be given for a multitude of reasons.

Sometimes it may be given as a part of your curative cancer regimen.

Other times it can be given for something we call palliation, which is for pain or symptom management, but radiation is when they use high energy to target the cancer cells.

Immunotherapy is definitely the new wave of the future, I believe, and what this does is it activates your immune system to help fight off the cancer.

Immunotherapy is also administered through an IV infusion.

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