Side Effects From a Chemotherapy Overdose

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Dr. David Cathcart. I'm a family practice physician from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, and we're going to talk about chemotherapy drugs, and their side effects today. The chemotherapy drugs are generally toxic drugs. In that they kill rapidly dividing cells. Aside from the side effects that one can get from the death of rapidly dividing cells, for example cancer cells, you can have side effects from the drug itself. For example, aspirin can cause stomach irritation, and some of the oral chemotherapeutic pills can also cause stomach irritation. In addition to the other side effects that they cause, as a result of their doing their job as chemotherapy drugs. The difference between a medication and a poison is frequently the dose. And a smaller dose, of a poison, may be beneficial. But a heavy dose, or too heavy of a dose of a medication, can be poison. So my point is that medications, and poisons are very much, or can be the same thing separated by a margin of safety. What certainly we want in terms of chemotherapy, we want to give enough that it kills the cancer cells, that we're trying to kill. But not so much that it kills so many cells, or us. This is Dr. Cathcart talking to you about high dose, or the effects of chemotherapy overdosing."