Various factors like the level of infection, the area of infection, the extent of contamination, the condition of the affected cells, the patient's age, his overall health etc have to be considered for mesothelioma treatment. The patient should be made aware of his treatment process before it is started.

Three kinds of traditional mesothelioma treatment are in vogue, namely, surgery, medication and radiation. Surgery attempts to remove the cancer altogether while medication or chemotherapy fights the cancer through powerful drugs. Radiation is the process of destroying malignant cancer cells by use of high energy x-rays or other energy beams. In more serious cases, doctors try to contain the cancer by using a combination of two or three of these tactics.

Since clinical tests like blood analysis are not particularly successful in determining the type of cancer, diagnostic procedures like thorascocopy, video assisted thoracic surgery, mediastinoscopy and laproscopy are used to identify the malaise. The actual mesothelioma treatment starts after this.

If the infection is comparatively mild, the cancer can be removed from its roots through surgery. Palliative surgical procedures which treat the symptoms than the causes are also resorted to these days. They include pleuroperitoneal shunt, pleurodesis, pleurectomy, thoracoscopy etc. Pleurodesis and chest tube drainage are the most common among palliative treatment, which cleans the affected areas.

Aggressive curative procedures try to remove the disease in its totality. For pleural mesothelioma, which is the commonest form of asbestos cancer accounting for more than three-fourths of total cases, decortication is used to remove tumor from stage 1 and stage 2 patients without removing the lung. If the tumor is not removable without extracting the lung, then pneumonectomy, which entails removal of a lung, is resorted to. No surgery is made without adequate tests and analysis.

Chemicals are used in chemotherapy and it destroys cancerous cells from multiplying. It also assists in preventing the spread of infection, shrinking existing tumors and removing remnants of the disease once the surgery is done. Where there is no hope for a cure, palliative chemotherapy is resorted to. In radiotherapy, penetrating rays of energy or particle streams are employed. This is used along with surgical procedures. In a nut shell, mesothelioma treatment aims at removing the cancer and it is a comprehensive technique.