Treatment Options

Treatment

At Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, your doctors can offer you melanoma treatment options that include the latest therapies, some available only through clinical trials at SCCA and our parent institutions, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and UW Medicine.

If you have melanoma, you will be treated at the SCCA clinic on south Lake Union. If you are an SCCA patient who has been diagnosed with another type of skin cancer, you will be seen by a dermatologist at University of Washington Medical Center.

The treatment your doctors recommend will depend on where your cancer is located, its size, and its “stage.” The stage is an indication of how far your cancer has spread. Your overall health is another factor your doctors will consider in making treatment recommendations.

Making treatment choices together

You will discuss treatment options with your doctors and other members of your health-care team. Your SCCA team will recommend a treatment, or combination of treatments, that they think is best for you.

Our doctors match treatments to individual patients. The right treatment for someone else, one that you’ve heard about on the news or even one that stands out in the medical literature, may not be the best treatment for you.

Your doctors will also tell you about any clinical trials for which you may be eligible. Cancer clinical trials are research studies to test new cancer treatments; some clinical trials also examine new kinds of screening, diagnosis, or cancer prevention.

Treatment options for melanomas include: