Technology; If Fire Fails Against Cancer, Try Ice

Typically surgeons and oncologists have used scalpels, radiation and chemotherapy to kill cancerous tumors, but there is a new method out called cryosurgery where the tumor is frozen. This cryosurgery was first used in liver cancer patients, because liver cancer does not respond to radiation or chemotherapy and since it has multiple tumors it is hard to remove surgically. It has been extremely effective though, and in a study with 18 patients with terminal liver cancer, 5 are now in complete remission, and the others lived twice as long as the average life expectancy of a patient with inoperable liver cancer. In addition, due to its extreme success, it is now being used in patients with prostate cancer. The advantages of cryosurgery is that it costs less than the conventional methods and uses 5 probes inserted into the skin instead of a large incision like surgery, which allows the patient to spend less time in the hospital. Plus, the cryosurgery can be repeated without unreasonable trauma to the patient like radiation therapy, and it freezes blood vessels around the tissue that has been frozen, so if any cancer survives the freezing it will most likely die from a lack of a vasculature. The instruments to preform the cryosurgery were created by Gary M. Onik and Boris Rubinsky, and they developed their probe to keep the liquid nitrogen in a liquid-solid state, that allows it to get much colder than previous probes and be more effective. This technology was coupled with ultrasound technology so that the doctor can see in real time what is being frozen in the body because frozen tissue is distinct on the ultrasound screen, and effectively target all the cancerous regions. The reason I decided to read and post this article was because of how interesting the topic was and how it has the possibility of treating other cancers and curing people who would otherwise have died from cancer without this treatment.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/1992/11/22/business/technology-if-fire-fails-against-cancer-try-ice.html?src=pm