3. Referral surgery, cryosurgery and chemotherapy
Many patients are sent to us for surgery, cryosurgery or chemotherapy. We are very careful to maintain our aims of putting the life quality as our main objective for the patient. There are times when this is in conflict with advancing veterinary techniques but our priority is the patients' welfare. Where we feel there is a conflict we leave others to push forward the frontiers whilst we attend to the patients of today. Most veterinary practices are proficient in handling some of the cytotoxic drugs used routinely in veterinary medicine but there are some drugs that are probably best administered by those with experience in the field. Therefore we routinely see patients for the administration of chemotherapy. This is usually done on an out-patient basis with the patient being referred back to the presenting veterinary surgeon for the rest of the treatment.

4. Brachytherapy

The CTU has been at the forefront of developing brachytherapy for use in veterinary oncology. Brachytherapy is the use of radioactive sources such as Iridium-192 for the local treatment of neoplastic disease. We recognise that we are years (and millions of pounds!) behind the treatment of humans with comparable conditions and we are pleased to see that in some other countries forms of brachytherapy akin to human treatment is becoming available. However we are developing the use of thermolabile moulds and intracavity devices for the treatment of many types of tumour. We have developed a technique for delivering a calculated dose of radiation to intranasal tumours. The great benefit of brachytherapy in these cases is that we are treating from the inside out rather than vice versa. We would now argue that for intranasal tumours which have not traversed the medial nasal septum and which are rostrally located, brachytherapy following a unilateral rhinotomy is the treatment of choice. This is also the case for a number of skin and superficial tumours where brachytherapy is the pre-operative or post-operative treatment of choice for destroying the locally invading cancer cells. Often brachytherapy is part of a combination of treatments involving surgery, radiotherapy and sometimes chemotherapy as well. The great advantage of brachytherapy over external beam radiotherapy is that the delivery system give the potential of delivering a higher dose to a very specifically localised area. This makes the technique most suitable for those tumours which have a high invasive but low metastatic potential and which are located in the skin. There are other tumours which are much more suitably treated with external beam radiotherapy and the two systems are seldom in conflict for treatment of choice as they both have individual merits for differing situations.