Medical Oncology

FV Day Care Chemotherapy Centre

The FV Day Care Chemotherapy Centre is designed as a sanctuary for healing. We recognise that systemic treatments including chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and immunotherapy require a delicate balance of medical rigor and patient comfort.

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Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is one of the most common cancer treatment modalities. It involves the delivery of drugs to kill or prevent the growth of fast-dividing cells, including cancer cells. However, chemotherapy also affects normal, healthy cells that divide rapidly, leading to various side-effects.

In contrast to localized treatments such as surgery and radiation therapy, which only focus on the tumor or the organ that is affected by cancer, chemotherapy works systemically, i.e., it targets the entire body and kills cancer cells throughout the body. Thus, it is generally the treatment of choice for patients diagnosed with cancer that has a higher chance of spreading to other organs or has already metastasized.

At Hy Vong we use the latest international evidence-based guidelines such as ESMO (European Society for Medical Oncology), ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) and NCCN (National Comprehensive Cancer Network).

Chemotherapy can be administered in various ways based on the type of cancer, the specific drugs used, and the patient’s overall health.

The main methods

• Intravenous (IV) chemotherapy
• Oral chemotherapy
• Intra-arterial chemotherapy

For IV Chemotherapy, we routinely use an implantable chamber, or “port”, a small, implanted device placed under the skin, usually on the upper chest, to provide easy, long-term access to a vein for chemotherapy.

Your oncologist may tell you that you need several “rounds” or “cycles” of chemotherapy. This means you will have several treatment days followed by recovery days. This on-again/off-again schedule gives the medicine time to work while allowing your body time to heal.

Infusions are delivered in our Day Care Centre, designed with private units and professional monitoring to minimise side effects and maximise safety, while ensuring your comfort.

Before each session, you may receive supportive medications to minimise immediate side effects.

Chemotherapy may be associated with a range of possible side effects, which may affect the patient’s quality of life. These include loss of appetite, nausea, mouth sores, ulcers, fatigue, hair loss, diarrhoea and nerve damage. However, many of these side effects are transient and reversible, and can be treated with effective supportive medications such as anti-vomiting and anti-diarrhoeal medications.

Targeted Therapy

Targeted therapy is a type of cancer treatment that targets proteins that control how cancer cells grow, divide, and spread. It is the foundation of precision medicine and a major advancement in cancer care.

Most targeted therapies are either small-molecule drugs or monoclonal antibodies. The drugs circulate through the body like chemotherapy but they work in a more focused way and may have fewer side effects than chemotherapy.

Targeted therapy can be used to treat breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer and many other cancers such as colorectal, liver, head and neck, and blood cancers as well as skin cancers like melanoma.

Targeted therapy and breast cancer

Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy is one of the most significant breakthroughs in modern oncology. While chemotherapy works to kill cancer cells directly, immunotherapy aims to boost the body’s own immune system to fight cancer.

There are different kinds of immunotherapy that work in different ways. It can boost the immune system to work more effectively against cancer or remove “barriers” that cancer cells use to hide, allowing the immune system to attack the tumour.

It is indicated for many cancer types and often causes fewer side effects than other systemic treatments. In several hard-to-treat cancers—such as lung cancer or melanoma—immunotherapy has proven highly effective in controlling disease.

Hormonal Therapy

Hormonal therapy is a cancer treatment that slows or stops the growth of cancers that use hormones to grow, particularly some types of breast cancer (hormone-receptor-positive breast cancers), and prostate cancer (androgen deprivation therapy).

Hormonal therapy may be used alone as the main treatment or with other treatments. It may be used before surgery to shrink the tumour and make it easier to remove or before radiation therapy to shrink the tumour so radiation can be given to a smaller area. Hormonal therapy may be given in addition to main treatments such as surgery, radiotherapy or chemotherapy to lower the risk that the cancer will come back.

Hormonal therapy is often a long-term treatment, sometimes spanning several years to maintain control over the cancer.