Gamma Knife Radiosurgery: A Patient’s Eye View

Abstract

The patients requiring Gamma Knife radiosurgery will usually be suffering from a dangerous, potentially life threatening and thus intensely worrying condition. Yet where are they to receive information of the treatment, if their own doctor decides that this is the best option? There is a certain amount of highly specialised original literature, virtually no general knowledge and unfortunately a fair amount of rumour, more or less ill informed. Anyone who has treated even a small number of patients with radiosurgery will be able to confirm the role of rumour in the information these patients have received. Thus, it is necessary to have some hard reliable and readily comprehensible facts for the patients. Such information seems to come under two main headings. Firstly, there is information relating to the technique of treatment itself. This will be the subject of the current chapter. Secondly, there is information relating to the specific illness and the expected course and chances of success, following treatment. This seems more properly to be the province of the individual chapters related to the individual illnesses, which follow in the next section. Inevitably the suggestions for information that follow here are predicated on the assumption that the Gamma Knife has been chosen as the desired form of treatment.