I think the term is an ablative and/or autologous bone marrow transplant. My father had this performed to treat type ii non hodgkins lymphoma. Essentially, if there is no donor, you can draw a patient's own bone marrow, attempt to treat it so that it has no cancerous cells, culture the hopefully cleansed bone marrow, kill all the patient's bone marrow in their body via high doses of chemo and/or radiation, then reimplant the patient's own cultured and hopefully safe bone marrow. While the patient has no bone marrow they will be completely dependent on donor blood. What these antiseptic descriptions mask is "killing a patient's bone marrow" is roughly equal to poisoning that person just a tiny bit shy of killing him or her.
> What these antiseptic descriptions mask is "killing a patient's bone marrow" is roughly equal to poisoning that person just a tiny bit shy of killing him or her.
That's a description of most cancer treatments, especially the traditional ones.
Cancer cells are so similar to normal healthy tissue, they're difficult to target with high specificity. Most treatments (especially chemo and radiation) work by killing cancer cells marginally better than they kill (most) normal cells. The targeting is getting better for both classes of treatment, but the collateral damage is still significant.
Killing all bone marrow cells indiscriminately sidesteps the targeting issue, with the trade-off that you effectively remove an entire vital organ. This is just as drastic, but in this particular case happens to be a surmountable obstacle.
