Your surgeon uses a small, thin tube with a camera to look inside your body. Samples (biopsies) can be removed from your bowel and sent to the lab for testing.
If your surgeon finds any polyps during the endoscopy, they will remove them to reduce risk of cancer developing. They will also look for other causes for your symptoms (haemorhoids, diverticulae, anal fissures).
The most common types of endoscopy are:
Flexible Sigmoidoscopy: looks inside your rectum (back passage) and the lower part of the large bowel (sigmoid colon).
Colonoscopy: views your entire large bowel to look for polyps or a tumour.
These scans can provide useful information for the presence of cancer and the spread to other organs. This can help your doctors decide on the most effective treatment for you.
This is where the cancerous section of the bowel is removed. Your surgeon may use open, keyhole or robotic surgery, depending on your specific situation.
We offer robotic surgery via the da Vinci X robot, which has been shown to reduce blood loss and enable a quicker recovery with less post-operative pain.
Radiotherapy and Chemotherapy destroy cancer cells in the body.
Radiotherapy does this by using high doses of radiation to kill off the cancerous tumours.
Chemotherapy involves the use of drugs specifically designed to kill cancer cells.
Targeted therapies are a group of medicines that make chemotherapy more effective by preventing the cancer from spreading. Targeted therapies are sometimes used alongside chemotherapy when the cancer has spread beyond the bowel.