The radiation therapy is the second most popular conventional treatment procedure used in treating the prostate cancer, after the operation known as prostatectomy. The radiotherapy uses two treatment methods: the brachytherapy or the internal beam radiation and the external beam radiation. The effect of the radiotherapy, in both cases, is the damage done to the DNA of the cancerous cells to stop them from multiplying at a rapid speed. The proton treatment is a procedure invented in the twentieth century and in the first stages, the medical community used the intraprostatic radium implants. Soon after, this method was replaced with the use of the proton energy, more exactly in 1946, when this treatment gave some good results after being used for the more common diseases such as cancer. The proton beam radiation therapy is a complex form of treatment, done only under the general and careful observation of oncologists or the radiation therapy specialists.

The patient receives this treatment in a guidance room, under the direct observation of physicians and specialized computers, the beam being directly used only on the infected area of the body. This procedure goes something like this: the proton used in this kind of therapy starts its journey in an injector, found in an electric field, where the hydrogen atoms are divided into positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons; the protons are transported through a vacuum tube to the synchrotron, circulating at a rapid speed and increasing the protons energy with approximately two hundred fifty million electron volts, penetrating the skin at any depth. The proton therapy treatment successfully replaces the Cobalt-60 gamma-ray therapy or the x-ray therapy.

The side-effects are normal for all types of prostate cancer treatments, especially for the radiation therapy or the androgen deprivation therapy. The energy dose required to treat the cancer depends on the type of cancer, the stage or just how advanced is the tumor is the body and last, but not least, what are the reactions of the patients to this sort of treatment and the after effects. The common side-effects are impotence and urinary or fecal incontinence and sometimes the proton beam radiation can also damage some surrounding healthy tissues because oncologists don’t have the possibility to guess exactly what necessary energy dose to use. The intensity of the dose can either be low-rate or LDR, medium-dose or MDR, a high-dose or HDR and a pulsed-dose rate or PDR.

It would be better for the doctor to have some experience with these treatment procedures because he will know exactly, just by giving a personal interpretation of the disease’s characteristics, the required proton energy dose and usually the results of the temporary brachytherapy will be affected if the radiation sources aren’t correctly placed on the infected area for the necessary period of time, either being a few minutes or sometimes, hours. If a patient has a disease with low risk he can either choose radiotherapy or prostatectomy as a treatment method; the intermediate and high risk diseases are treated with radiation therapy and for a long or a short period of time with hormonal ablation. If the patients respond well to the treatment, there is a high chance to cure the cancer, but only if it is detected in the early stages. The metastatic cancer makes life painful and should be avoided at all cost.