From what I understand: a bone-marrow transplant is a procedure that allows you to give a higher dose of chemotherapy. The chemo kills the cancer (hopefully) and then the bone-marrow transplant rescues the patient, because the dose is so high it also kills off part of the patient's immune system and a replacement is required.
A bone marrow transplant is also (at least in part) a way of essentially rebooting the immune system (my friend Karen Williams just had one as a treatment for MS--the notion being that you're resetting the immune response to its original factory settings. This is helpful when you're dealing with blood-based cancers, but also, as you say, as a way of permitting higher chemo doses.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2017-11-25 04:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-11-25 04:23 pm (UTC)