Radical and palliative treatment of malignant tumors is carried out with the help of various antitumor effects, which with a certain degree of conditionality can be divided into 3 main groups

1) antitumor effects of a local-regional type — surgical treatment, radiation therapy;

2) general-type antitumor effects — systemic chemotherapy, hormone therapy, which are often combined in practice with the terms drug therapy or simply chemotherapy;

3) auxiliary antitumor effects — immunotherapy, metabolic metabolic rehabilitation, the use of modifying factors (hyperthermia, hyperglycemia, hyper-oxygenation, magnetic therapy, etc.).

The basis of the treatment of lung cancer is surgical intervention. Only radical surgery allows us to hope for the long-term survival of patients and creates real prospects for their complete cure of lung cancer. The effectiveness of conservative treatment methods, such as: radiation therapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, etc., is still significantly inferior to the possibilities of surgical treatment of the disease, and their independent use, as a rule, does not lead to a complete cure for lung cancer. However, these methods allow the treatment to be applied to a wider range of patients and at times significantly prolong their life, and, in combination with surgery, significantly improve its results.

Each of the different types of antitumor effects is designed to perform specific tasks determined on the basis of the analysis of the clinical and biological manifestations of the tumor, its localization, morphological structure, degree of anaplasia, stage of distribution, individual characteristics of the patient’s body, its response to developmental complications. Therefore, in recent decades, the development of individualized programs for the radical treatment of cancer patients, which include the use of more than one method, and their combinations, sequentially or simultaneously, has been increasingly used to treat malignant tumors of many localizations. For patients with advanced stages of lung cancer development, this approach seems to be the most logical and reasonable.

To refer to such treatment programs in oncology, special terms are used — combined, complex, and combined treatment. However, uniformity in their understanding is not achieved. To create a unified view of the content of these definitions, R.A. Melnikov et al. (1989) propose to approach not from the standpoint of simple addition of the number of applied methods of treatment, but on the basis of ideas about the essence of each of them.

Therefore, it is advisable, from the point of view of the authors, to consider combined treatment, in which two or more different methods are used that have the same direction (for example, the combination of two local-regional influences — operative and radiation). Comprehensive treatment includes antitumor effects of both locally-regional and general types (for example, surgery and systemic chemotherapy). Under the combined treatment should imply the use within the same method of different

methods of its implementation or the use of anticancer drugs that differ in their mechanism of action in the course of chemotherapy (for example, polychemotherapy, a combination of interstitial and external irradiation, etc.).