Immunotherapy is an effective treatment for many types of cancer, and its use is growing. In some cases, it is prescribed instead of the more traditional approaches of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. In other cases, doctors use it to treat cancer in addition to those other approaches. An obvious benefit of immunotherapy is that it can help extend the length and quality of a cancer patient’s life, but there are a number of other benefits as well.

1- Precision

Radiation and chemotherapy have provided huge benefits to patients with cancer, curing them, putting cancer into remission, or extending their lives and reducing their suffering from cancer. However, these approaches do not always have the precision that immunotherapy has. Chemotherapy and radiation can cause damage to healthy cells while immunotherapy more precisely targets cancer cells and leaves healthy cells alone.

2- Fewer Side Effects

Despite the popular perception that people undergoing chemotherapy and radiation always suffer from severe side effects, including weight and hair loss, the side effects from these treatments vary greatly and may be mild. However, side effects are still often significant. In part because of its precision, immunotherapy produces fewer side effects in most patients than chemotherapy and radiation, and among those who do suffer from side effects, they tend to be milder ones. It is sometimes said that for some people with cancer, the treatment makes them feel worse than the disease itself. This is much less likely to be the case with immunotherapy.

3- Convenience

Cancer treatment is always tailored to the individual, but for many people, radiation is administered daily, and chemotherapy once a week. This means traveling to a facility regularly to receive these treatments. Immunotherapy may be administered just once every few weeks or, in some cases, can be taken in pill form. This makes immunotherapy far less disruptive to people’s everyday lives than traditional cancer treatments, allowing them to continue work, school, or other activities with few to no interruptions.

4- Strengthens Immune System

Immunotherapy works by strengthening the immune system. In this sense, it has the opposite effect of chemotherapy, which damages the overall immune system even as it helps to kill cancer cells. It can give the body the boost it needs to attack existing and new cancer cells that form.

5- Adaptability

One of the many reasons cancer can be difficult to treat is because of the ease with which it evolves and spreads. Immunotherapy is adaptable, meaning it can respond to those changes in several ways. It can work on tumors even if they have not been detected by the medical team. It can also respond to a reoccurrence of cancer, meaning that it can keep cancer in remission over a potentially longer period of time than conventional treatments.

Oncologists use a variety of approaches to treat cancer based on a number of different factors, including the type and stage of cancer, the patient’s overall health, their age, and their own preferences. Immunotherapy may not be the right treatment for everyone, but for many cancer patients, it offers hope and benefits that other treatments cannot provide.