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Proton therapy is an advanced treatment that delivers radiation to the exact size, shape and depth of your tumor. It allows your physician to treat your cancer while helping to protect nearby healthy tissue, like your brain, eyes and spine.
— Mark, head and neck patient
For head and neck tumors, treatment usually means surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. When it comes to radiation, proton therapy provides a safer option. It lowers the risk of side effects such as vision loss, hearing loss, trouble swallowing and dry mouth.
With standard X-ray radiation therapy, the radiation dose is highest right where the X-rays enter your body. The X-rays keep giving off radiation as they go through your tumor and the tissue beyond. With proton radiation therapy, treatment is sent right to the tumor. The goal is for less radiation to reach your nearby tissue.
Proton therapy uses a unique feature of protons: They give off the most radiation right before they come to a stop. Then the radiation falls to zero. That’s how we target treatment to your tumor and no further.
More precision means less damage to healthy cells in your brain, neck, eyes, sinuses, vocal cords and salivary glands. This can mean a faster recovery and fewer short- and long-term side effects.
If you have head or neck cancer, the radiation oncologists at our proton therapy facility can decide if proton therapy is right for you and tell you more about this option.
Proton therapy may be an option for people with a wide range of head and neck cancers, including:
Proton therapy may also be an option for some people who have already had radiation therapy.
Our radiation oncologists use pencil-beam scanning (PBS) to treat patients with proton therapy. PBS “paints” the tumor with a lot of very thin, very exact beams of protons. The beams are accurate down to millimeters. PBS sends very fast pulses of protons to each planned spot within the tumor until the entire cancer is treated. This method can lower the amount of radiation to healthy tissue even more.
Our proton therapy team is here not only to treat your disease, but to listen to you and take care of you and your family. They are experts in proton therapy who focus on giving you personalized treatment and who understand your questions, needs and concerns.