therapy
Meaning of therapy: One of the least specific words in medicine, it marks that treatment is happening while the word in front of it carries the detail.
Definition of therapy
Therapy is any treatment, or planned course of treatment, given to improve a health condition, control disease, relieve symptoms, restore lost function or support a person's quality of life. The word covers medicines, surgery, radiation, rehabilitation, talking treatments and devices, used singly or in combination.
What kinds of therapy are there?
The word takes its meaning from whatever is placed in front of it.
| Kind | What it involves |
|---|---|
| Drug therapy | Medicines given by mouth, by injection or by infusion |
| Radiation therapy | Targeted high energy beams or implanted sources |
| Physical therapy | Exercise and hands-on techniques to restore movement |
| Psychotherapy | Structured talking treatment for mental and emotional difficulty |
| Replacement therapy | Supplying something the body no longer makes, such as a hormone |
| Device therapy | Equipment that supports a failing function, such as oxygen |
These overlap in practice. Radiation therapy and drug therapy are frequently given together, and rehabilitation after surgery usually combines physical therapy with several of the others. Psychotherapy is the formal name for the talking treatments, which is why the bare word therapy in everyday speech commonly means that rather than the wider medical sense.
What do the words attached to therapy mean?
A second set of words describes the intent rather than the method. Curative therapy aims to remove disease altogether. Palliative therapy aims at comfort and symptom control where cure is not the goal, and it can run alongside treatment that is intended to cure. Supportive therapy manages the effects of the disease or of other treatment. Adjuvant therapy follows a main treatment to lower the chance of the disease returning, and neoadjuvant therapy comes before it, often to shrink a tumor first. Maintenance therapy continues at reduced intensity once the disease is under control. First-line therapy is the option tried first, with second-line and later choices following if it fails or stops working. Combination therapy uses more than one agent at once, while monotherapy uses a single one.
How is therapy different from a cure?
Therapy names the attempt, not the result. Many long-term conditions have effective therapy and no cure at all: the treatment holds the illness in check for as long as it continues, and the illness returns when it stops. Insulin in diabetes, inhalers in asthma and medicines for high blood pressure all work in that pattern. Other therapies do cure, and some are given in full knowledge that cure is out of reach, with comfort and function as the aim instead. Because the word itself promises nothing, the benefit, risk, duration and goal belong to the specific intervention rather than to the label. The same looseness explains why therapy appears widely outside medicine, attached to practices that have never been tested.
Used in a sentence
Physical therapy was included in the rehabilitation plan after the injury.
Good to know
The word therapy does not identify a specific treatment or guarantee a cure, since the expected benefits, risks, duration and goals depend on the particular intervention and the person receiving it.
Word origin
Where “therapy” comes from
From Greek therapeia, meaning healing, treatment or service, from therapeuein, to attend to or to treat medically.