Glossary of Medical and Health Terms

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is the use of chemical substances to treat disease. In its modern-day use, it refers to cytotoxic drugs used to treat cancer or the combination of these drugs into a standardized form of treatment.

In its non-oncological use, the term may also refer to antibiotics (antibacterial chemotherapy). In that sense, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent was Paul Ehrlich's arsphenamine, an arsenic compound discovered in 1909 and used to treat syphilis. This was later followed by sulfonamides discovered by Domagk and penicillin discovered by Alexander Fleming.

Other uses of cytostatic chemotherapy agents are the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis and the suppression of transplant rejections.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy

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