What are the Short and Long Term Side Effects of Chemotherapy?
As with most drugs, chemotherapy drugs do have side effects. Side effects of chemotherapy are unwanted things that happen as a direct result of taking a drug. It is easy to confuse drug side effects with symptoms of cancer. Symptoms are the things that happen as a direct result of the cancer and have nothing to do with the drug. Different chemotherapy drugs have different short term and long term side effects and certainly not all chemotherapy drugs cause every side effect. In general, chemotherapy damages cells that are dividing, so the parts of the body where normal cells divide frequently are likely to be affected by chemotherapy. The mouth, intestines, skin, hair, bone marrow (the spongy material that fills your bones and produces new blood cells) are commonly affected by chemotherapy. Hair is growing all the time. The skin is constantly renewing itself. So are the lining of the mouth and digestive system. To do this, the cells of all these body tissues must constantly divide to pr
