Free
E-newsletter
Subscribe to Housecall
Our weekly general interest
e-newsletter keeps you up to date
on a wide variety of health topics.
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Definition
By Mayo Clinic staff
Radiation therapy is a type of cancer treatment that uses beams of intense energy to kill cancer cells. Radiation therapy most often gets its power from X-rays, but the power can also come from protons or other types of energy.
The term "radiation therapy" most often refers to external beam radiation therapy. During this type of radiation, the high-energy beams come from a machine outside of your body that aims the beams at a precise point on your body. During a different type of radiation treatment called brachytherapy (brak-e-THER-uh-pee), radiation is placed inside your body.
Radiation therapy damages cells by destroying the genetic material that controls how cells grow and divide. While both healthy and cancerous cells are damaged by radiation therapy, the goal of radiation therapy is to destroy as few normal, healthy cells as possible.
- Radiation therapy and you: Support for people with cancer. National Cancer Institute. http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/radiation-therapy-and-you/allpages. Accessed May 10, 2011.
- External beam therapy (EBT). RadiologyInfo.org. http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=ebt. Accessed May 10, 2011.
Find Mayo Clinic on