Medical Forum / Diseases and Disorders / Prostate Cancer / April 2008
A new approach to killing cancer cells involving nanotechnology and radio waves, devised by John Kanzius.
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Joe - 15 Apr 2008 14:06 GMT http://muvy.org/new.php?q=cancer
ErnieA - 15 Apr 2008 14:48 GMT > http://muvy.org/new.php?q=cancer I just read about this. It sounds too good and too simple to be true. Is it?
Ernie Adsett
Alan Meyer - 15 Apr 2008 15:57 GMT > >http://muvy.org/new.php?q=cancer > > I just read about this. It sounds too good and too simple to be true. > Is it? > > Ernie Adsett There's also an article about this in the Wikipedia. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-invasive_RF_cancer_treatment
This certainly sounds promising, and maybe it's not too good to be true, though we won't know until there have been clinical trials.
I would think that there are many technical hurdles to overcome. A key one is to develop antibody agents that find and bind to cancer cells, and only to cancer cells, and completely to cancer cells (i.e., there aren't any, or at least not many, of the antibodies floating around in the bloodstream), and which are also capable of carrying target particles - gold or carbon nanotubes.
I know that the technology for that is under active development. It has been proposed for at least two other treatments with similar concepts in which I think there have been some clinical trials. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoclonal_antibody_therapy
One treatment attaches chemotherapy drugs to the antibody agents. The drugs are taken to cancer cells where they kill the cancer.
A refinement of that uses light sensitive chemotherapy drugs bound to the antibodies. The patient is injected with the drugs in a dark room and kept there for some hours. After the antibodies are believed to have bound to the cancer, lasers are aimed at the cancerous areas to activate the chemotherapeutic agents. I think the idea of that one is that the drugs are harmless until activated, and then only in the area that light has been shined on. Then, of course, the patient has to be kept in the dark until the drugs flush out of his system.
All of these treatments seem to me to hold great promise. First of all, they can potentially leave healthy cells alone - something that our current radiation and chemotherapy techniques can't do. Secondly, they don't involve cutting and sewing up. Thirdly, I would think they could be used to attack metastatic cancer cells as well as local cancers. So potentially, some day, even men with cancer all over their bodies can be cured, or at least the cancer can be periodically knocked down.
I would think that, even if they work great, the treatments might not provide permanent cures for all people. Cancer cells mutate a lot. It may be that among any population of cancer cells, some might not express the target antigen, meaning that the antibodies won't find them. They would continue to reproduce and eventually become the dominant cancer population in a process similar to hormone refractoriness or chemotherapy refractoriness.
That has been a problem with monoclonal antibody therapy for breast cancer. Not all breast cancer cells express the same antigens (unique molecules on the surfaces of the cells).
So I'm thinking that surgery or radiation or other techniques that attempt to kill all of the cancer while it's local will continue to be the first line of defense. But this new nanotechnology might be a great second line treatment. Or maybe I'm wrong about refractoriness and it will become a good first line treatment.
We'll have to find out what the trials tell us. However even if the trials are not very successful, better antibodies might be discovered in the future, making the technique more effective.
Alan
drceephd@insightbb.com - 15 Apr 2008 16:59 GMT You should check out the history of RF and cancer. Rife did it in the 1930s successfully.
Even later a patent was given in the 1990s for a similar procedure and developed by Robert Beck.
Not much interest in it from big pharma. A really good cancer patient is now worth a million dollars. Why trade that for a single dollars worth of electricity?
DrCee You cannot secure nor restore health with pus or poisons.
doofy - 15 Apr 2008 17:04 GMT > DrCee > You cannot secure nor restore health with pus or poisons. Homeopathists would disagree.
drceephd@insightbb.com - 15 Apr 2008 20:53 GMT > drcee...@insightbb.com wrote: > > DrCee > > You cannot secure nor restore health with pus or poisons. > > Homeopathists would disagree. Actually homeopaths would agree whole heartedly since their theory of disease treatment sprang from the effort of Hahnemann to free Europe from the scourge of allopathy.
Notice that I said " disease treatment" and not "disease causation".
DrCee You cannot secure nor restore health with pus or poisons.
doofy - 15 Apr 2008 22:52 GMT >>drcee...@insightbb.com wrote: >> [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > DrCee > You cannot secure nor restore health with pus or poisons. But they do it by, at least sometimes, using diluted poisons.
drceephd@insightbb.com - 16 Apr 2008 01:00 GMT > drcee...@insightbb.com wrote: > [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > > - Show quoted text - Very true. I cannot agree with using mercury, arsenic, snake venom, etc. as remedies in any concentration.
However, I can agree with the philosophy of the "law of similars", whereby it is assumed that a disease is a healing effort on the part to the living organism and the remedies are to assist in that effort. This is vastly superior to allopathy and their treatment by the "law of the opposite."
DrCee You cannot secure nor restore health with pus or poisons.
I.P. Freely - 16 Apr 2008 03:29 GMT Before wasting any time on this crossposter, Google up homeopathy on Quackwatch. Hint: It begins with "Homeopathy: The Ultimate Fake"
I.P.
doofy - 16 Apr 2008 16:23 GMT > Before wasting any time on this crossposter, Google up homeopathy on > Quackwatch. > Hint: It begins with "Homeopathy: The Ultimate Fake" > > I.P. You should consider Quackwatch a reference point, but not a final authority. They went after, and destroyed the career of, a doctor who helped me immensely with some food allergy problems when no one else could.
My experience with homeopathy is thus:
You have to search to find the right remedy to use. I never did find the right one, but I did get some of the negative side effects with some of the remedies along the way. After I got the side effect, I looked up possible side effects, and there it was. So, I wasn't creating side effects by reading about them first.
So, these remedies do affect the body. It's not like there's nothing in there. However, I never found the right remedy for me.
I would not consider homeopathy for any critical health issues. However, I don't believe it is totally bogus.
Dwight
Alan Meyer - 16 Apr 2008 19:09 GMT > ... > I would not consider homeopathy for any critical health issues. > However, I don't believe it is totally bogus. <prolog> Before beginning my rant, remember that I am a guy who puts his pants on one leg at a time, just like the homeopathists. If I made a mistake in the following rant it's not because I'm an expert who just happened to make a mistake, but because I'm not an expert and I make mistakes all the time. </prolog>
<rant> Homeopathy was invented before anyone understood the real causes of disease. The theory was that you treat the patient with something that causes the same symptoms he has, but cut the dose down to the point that it doesn't actually harm him. The dose was cut by mixing the substance with water, shaking it, taking a bit out and mixing that with water, shaking it, etc. until basically all that was left was water that had been mysteriously "influenced" by the substance.
The basic theory is indeed totally bogus. It was invented by a guy who had no evidence for it whatsoever, just a hunch that it would work. No one has ever proposed any actual mechanism whereby this could help someone, nor any way to show that something that causes a symptom, say fever, has any connection to something else that causes that symptom. And of course there is no way that any substance mixed with water and then totally removed from the water can "influence" it in any way. Any chemist knows that's impossible.
Interestingly, patients who left their conventional doctors in the 1830's and turned to homeopathists did better than the ones who stayed with conventional medicine, and homeopathy got a good reputation from that. But the real cause was not that homeopathy was good, but that conventional medicine in those days was so bad that patients did better drinking "influenced" water than getting medical treatment. </rant>
Alan
doofy - 16 Apr 2008 20:28 GMT >> ... >> I would not consider homeopathy for any critical health issues. [quoted text clipped - 32 lines] > "influence" it in any way. Any chemist knows that's > impossible. Yet I was negatively affected, in a predicted way, but some of this diluted aether.
But, I'm not trying to proselytize for homeopathy. It never cured me of anything.
I'm just letting people know that naysayers aren't always totally right, just vocal.
Alan Meyer - 16 Apr 2008 20:58 GMT > I'm just letting people know that naysayers aren't > always totally right, just vocal. Vocal nails me right on the head. Worse, I do it in writing.
Still, one of the problems in evaluating treatments is that, even without treatment, we usually either get better or we get worse. Even in chronic conditions like arthritis, we have good days and bad days. So a change in our condition that happens to be associated with a treatment taken around the same time isn't always an effect of the treatment. And then too there is the placebo effect, which study after study has demonstrated.
So it's _very_ difficult and error prone to draw conclusions from our own experience. That's why we need theory and scientifically conducted clinical trials to get at what's really happening.
Alan
David Wright - 21 Apr 2008 04:41 GMT >> drcee...@insightbb.com wrote: >> [quoted text clipped - 21 lines] >Very true. I cannot agree with using mercury, arsenic, snake venom, >etc. as remedies in any concentration. Hope you never get bitten by a poisonous snake, Cee. Given your refusal to use certain remedies, you're a goner.
-- David Wright :: alphabeta at copper.net These are my opinions only, but they're almost always correct. "There are two kinds of Republicans: millionaires and suckers." -- John Dolan
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