I am very sorry that Teddy Kennedy has been diagnosed with brain cancer and wish him the best.
That said, why are surgery, radiation and chemotherapy the only treatments being considered?
The treatment of cancer has started to move toward treatments that are less damaging. Lung cancer is now being treated with heat, without surgery.
Reported by Susan Aldridge, PhD, medical journalist
Radiofrequency ablation treatment kills lung tumors without surgery, according to a new study.
In radiofrequency ablation, a probe is inserted into a tumor and heat is delivered through it to kill malignant tissue. It has a far lower rate of side effects than other treatments and does not require a surgical incision.
A team at the University of Pisa, Italy, reports upon a study of radiofrequency ablation in a group of 106 patients with either primary lung tumors or lung tumors secondary to another cancer. After treatment, the cancers were killed in 93 per cent of cases and cancer-specific one and two year survival rates were 91 per cent for those with a primary tumor. For those with a secondary tumor, survival rates were somewhat lower, as might be expected. The radiofrequency ablation approach looks as if it can offer a new option in lung cancer - for the patients studied here had tumors that could not be operated on.
Source
Society of Interventional Radiology meeting 2nd April 2005
http://www.healthandage.com/...
Or from another article:
Guided Heat for Inoperable Lung Cancer
Procedure Called RF Ablation as Effective as Radiation for Some Patients, Study Reports
By Salynn Boyles
WebMD Medical News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD
March 27, 2007 -- A minimally invasive treatment that uses guided heat to kill cancer cells shows promise as an alternative to radiation in patients with inoperable, early-stage lung cancers.
Researchers say radiofrequency (RF) ablation may offer older, sicker patients who are not good candidates for surgery an easier-to-tolerate treatment than radiation.
That's their conclusion after a study looking at 153 lung cancer patients with inoperable disease who were treated with RF ablation.
...
"In my lifetime, with improvements in lung cancer imaging and screening, I foresee techniques like radiofrequency ablation effectively treating very small lung cancers and saving patients from surgery," Dupuy says.
http://www.webmd.com/...
From Science News:
Treatment Gives Lung Cancer Patients With Inoperable Tumors Two Years Or More, Study Shows
ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2008)
— Radiofrequency ablation (RFA)—an interventional treatment that “cooks” and kills lung cancer tumors with heat—greatly improves survival time from primary or metastatic inoperable lung tumors, according to a new study. Of the 244 patients suffering from lung metastases (195 patients) or primary non-small cell lung cancer (49 patients), 70 percent were still alive at two years, including 72 percent for lung metastases and 64 percent for primary lung cancer.
These survival results are similar to surgical results from other studies, but the interventional treatment is less invasive and has far fewer side effects and less recovery time. The researchers found that RFA often can completely destroy the primary tumor and, therefore, extend a patient’s survival and greatly improve his or her quality of life. Survival thus becomes dependent on the extent of disease elsewhere in the body.
Of the 49 patients (ages 27–85) with non-small cell primary lung cancer who were treated with RFA, 85 percent had no viable lung tumors after one year on imaging, and 77 percent had no viable lung tumors after two years, which indicates a cure. This study was conducted in tumors four centimeters in diameter or smaller, and even better results were obtained for tumors smaller than two centimeters.
This type of treatment is called About Radiofrequency Ablation (RFA).
During the procedure, an interventional radiologist guides a small needle through the skin into the tumor, generally by computed tomography (CT). Radiofrequency (electrical) energy is transmitted to the tip of the needle where it produces heat in the tissues. The dead tumor tissue shrinks and slowly forms a scar. At the same time, heat from radiofrequency energy closes small blood vessels and lessens the risk of bleeding. RFA usually causes little discomfort.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved RFA for the treatment of tumors in soft tissue that includes the lung.
There are a group of physicians who specialize in what is called Interventional Radiology.
Interventional radiologists are physicians who specialize in minimally invasive, targeted treatments. They offer the most in-depth knowledge of the least invasive treatments available coupled with diagnostic and clinical experience across all specialties. They use X-rays, MRI and other imaging to advance a catheter in the body, usually in an artery, to treat at the source of the disease internally. As the inventors of angioplasty and the catheter-delivered stent, which were first used in the legs to treat peripheral arterial disease, interventional radiologists pioneered minimally invasive modern medicine. Interventional oncology is a growing specialty area of interventional radiology.
Today many conditions that once required surgery can be treated less invasively by interventional radiologists. Interventional radiology treatments offer less risk, less pain and less recovery time compared to open surgery.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/...
Heat ablation is also used for liver cancer.
From an article on the treatment:
What are some common uses of the procedure?
Radiofrequency ablation is used to treat two types of liver cancer:
hepatocellular carcinoma, which is a primary liver cancer (meaning it begins in the liver)
colon cancer that metastasizes or spreads from the colon to the liver.
In general, radiofrequency ablation is most effective treating tumors that are less than two inches in diameter. It may be used in addition to chemotherapy or radiation therapy or as an alternative to surgical treatment.
Radiofrequency ablation is a viable and effective treatment option if you:
are not a good candidate for surgery because your tumor is difficult to reach
have other medical conditions that make surgery especially risky
would not have enough liver tissue left for the organ to function adequately following the surgical removal of a tumor
have liver tumors that have not responded to chemotherapy or that have recurred after being removed surgically
you have several small liver tumors that are too spread out to be removed surgically.
http://www.radiologyinfo.org/...
The Pisa group also treats liver with heat.
Successful in Liver Tumors - Alternative to Surgery
RF ablation has been used successfully in the treatment of early-stage liver tumors for six years. Professor Lencioni: "For tumors with a diameter of about three centimeters, sustainable tumor destruction has even been achieved with a single needle insertion. In terms of patients' response rates and survival rates, this procedure is comparable to conventional surgical procedures and offers an alternative to surgery."
For larger tumors in the liver, the success rate of RF ablation is just 50 percent, however. In about half the cases, the tumor spreads to adjoining tissue even after radio frequency treatment. The chances of a cure for large tumors of the liver increase with minimally invasive procedures undertaken directly in the blood vessels. This fact has led to a new treatment approach.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/...
I did not find any heat treatments for brain cancer but wonder why it could not be useful, especially since there is brain tissue to be careful and surgery is always difficult.
There are also valuable alternative treatments but they are unlikely to be considered since Ted Kennedy has been part of reorganizing the FDA into a drug company that is eliminating vitamin companies, central to the alternative health movement. This seems to indicate he is unaware of its value and believes solely in an orthodox model of medical treatments.
This is unfortunate since the alternative health movement is helping to move orthodox medicine away from destructive treatments and toward gentler ones and ones that support and build the immune system so the body is strengthened and can join in tackling diseases itself. This approach differs from the "shock and awe" approaches normally used that may kill a cancer but leave the person's body so ravaged, it is unable to survive the damage.
I see two comparisons - one between the use of pesticides to raise crops and the use of organic farming, and another between the use of war to bring "freedom" and the use of diplomacy and social support to build friends.
To begin rethinking orthodox approaches, one can go to various sites on the internet to have a sense of the intelligence and care behind many of them, including Cancer Tutor. These treatments are not FDA recommended but then again, FDA approved rBGH and has remained mute about its being linked to a 7-fold increased risk of breast cancer, and is run by the large drug companies, including Monsanto which produces rBGH. These companies have a vested interested in orthodox medicine because it is the means to selling their drugs.
The impact of industrialization on everything including agriculture is visible in the following list of people with the following conditions or characteristics who may be at risk for developing a brain tumor. (Note Monsanto's inordinate threat to farmers and to all of us exposed through eating food with the residues of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers).
It is useful to note that
• Radiation exposure
• Increased age
• Exposure to pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer [Monsanto]
• Certain occupations, such as lead, petroleum, plastic, rubber, and textile workers, as well as aircraft and vehicle operators
• Exposure to electromagnetic fields [Cell phones are particularly associated with brain tumors]
• Certain viruses, especially Epstein-Barr virus
• People who have had transplants and individuals with AIDS
Alternative treatments have been badly treated by the media and government agencies:
... in 1976, two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, PhD, and an associate, Ewan Cameron, M.D., did a published scientific study in Scotland that resulted in proving that Vitamin C, given by I.V., of 10 grams a day, could extend the average length of time a terminal cancer patient lives by six times or more.
Had the medical community had any integrity, they would have quickly replicated his study, come to the same conclusion (because they did exactly what he did), and would have quickly started giving every cancer patient, terminal or otherwise, 10 grams of Vitamin C by I.V. every day.
But that is not what happened.
What really happened is that 3 studies were done at the Mayo Clinic, all of which were directly a result of the Pauling/Cameron study. However, these studies were not designed to replicate the Pauling/Cameron research. Instead they were designed to AVOID replicating the Pauling/Cameron protocol, AVOID their patient mix, and AVOID their statistical methods. Obviously, if you don't follow the same protocol, you won't get the same results. And they didn't.
Here is what the American Cancer Society (ACS) says about this issue:
"The Pauling study has been criticized by the NCI [National Cancer Institute, a division of the NIH or National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government agency] for being poorly designed, and subsequent studies done at the Mayo Clinic found that advanced cancer patients given the same dosage of vitamin C did not survive any longer than those not given the supplement. However, the Mayo Clinic trials have also been criticized for not fully addressing all the issues related to the effects of vitamin C, which still left questions about its effectiveness in the treatment of cancer." http://www.cancer.org/...
The ACS would have been insane to challenge the integrity of Linus Pauling (one of his Nobel Prizes was the Nobel Peace Prize, the other was in chemistry). So they quote the totally corrupt NIH (Note: 500 NIH employees were recently caught taking bribes from the pharmaceutical industry, which they called "outside consulting fees") and state that a world famous chemist, and two-time Nobel Prize winner, doesn't know how to design a scientific study!!
But they also admit that the Mayo clinic did not use the same protocol as Pauling and Cameron. So if there are "still left questions," why hasn't the ACS used their annual scores of millions of dollars of income, and their political clout, to set the record straight and replicate the study as originally done? It has been more 30 years since the original study, yet no one in orthodox medicine, with their billions of dollars in research money, not even the ACS or NIH, has replicated the Pauling/Cameron study.
It appears that extending the life expectancy of terminal cancer patients six-fold, using natural substances, is not important to orthodox medicine.
In fact, two other studies did replicate the Pauling/Cameron study far more closely than did the Mayo Clinic. Both of these studies verified the Pauling/Cameron results. For more information, see:
Article from eBook: "Case Study of Scientific Corruption"
Alternative views of cancer treatment
I wish Teddy Kennedy the very best, which I hope will include help from the best that orthodox medicine AND alternative medicine have to offer.