| Tracking effects of treatment
I'm looking for guidance on how the treatment of other patients here is being tracked. My mother is about to start radiotherapy for exceptionally rapidly-growing cancer tumors in her lungs (metastasized from earlier breast cancer), and I think it is important to track the progress of the treatment closely, because she'll be facing severe respiratory complications very soon if the cancer proves to be radio-resistant.
Is progress usually monitored by imaging? If so, what type of imaging, and how frequently?
Also, is lung capacity and throughput a good measure of progress? Measuring those things would obviously give us a lot less information than imaging, but it would be easy to measure them every day.
If there is a better forum for asking this question, I would be grateful for a pointer. I know the best forum would be the office of an experienced oncologist, but Mum's current oncologist has basically given her up for dead and is just going through the motions with her treatment. We are looking to switch oncologists now.
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