Since the early 1970s, incidence rates for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma have nearly doubled. Incidence rates for Hodgkin’s disease have declined about 60%. Better means of diagnosis has also increased the number as doctors better understand cancer of lymphocytes verses other diseases.
Most treatments strive to reduce that swelling- chemo, radiation- so the first line of defense would be to shrink the cancerous element. Removal - surgery - is not very common in lymphomas because these are blood cancers, not solid tumor cancers. It's not as easy as going in and removing as much of a tumor as the surgeon can see, it's about determining where the cancer has spread to and treating the patient in a systemic manner- meaning not just targeted therapy in one spot, but throughout the body.
Make sense?