Sequential Therapy
Most stage IV cancer patients will receive the same treatment until their disease starts to grow and progress, which ultimately allows cancer cells to develop resistance to treatment. Once a cancer develops resistance to treatment, new therapies are less likely to work and the cancer will continue to progress resulting in death.
Here at Lifespring Cancer Treatment Center, we try to stay one step ahead of the cancer by switching treatments before disease progression. By doing this, we may be able to prevent the development of resistance and improve patient outcomes, including possibly curing the disease. ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia) was previously 100% fatal but is now 80-90% curable using a similar process of sequential chemotherapy regimens given one after the other before the development of chemotherapy resistance.
In addition to decreasing the chance of developing disease resistance to treatment, switching treatments also does not allow treatment specific side effects to build up, so our patients generally enjoy a higher quality of life while they are receiving treatment.