MesoNews

If you have been diagnosed with cancer your immediate thoughts go to "what can I do about it?" Your doctor will offer his opinion and present options that you logically assume are the best that are available. You have lived your life, trusting the system, not realizing that the system is biased to support the economic interests of the providers and not necessarily the best interests of the patient. It is estimated that every cancer patient is worth a half million dollars to the industry by the time the patient dies following their last chemotherapy treatment.

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Brachytherapy is the use of radioactive substances to deliver radiation treatments. The term “brachy” comes from the Greek word for short range. This therapy is contrasted to that given as external beam radiation over a long range. Since the radioactive substances that are used in these treatments are only effective in the short range, they need to be placed in or very near the target. Hence, for mesothelioma, brachytherapy can be used as an “Intraoperative Radiation Therapy” (IORT).

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Photodynamic therapy (PDT) uses a combination of a photoactive drug (a drug that is activated by light) and light from a laser. Both work by targeting and destroying cancer cells while limiting damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Light therapy starts with an injection of a non-toxic photosensitizer drug. The drug goes into all cells of the body, but normal cells excrete it in about two days. Timing is crucial, because the tumor cells need to be exposed to the laser light after the drug has left the healthy cells but before the drug has left the mesothelioma cells. The laser light will activate the drug present within those cells and destroy them.

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Genentech’s drug Avastin did not help women with breast cancer live meaningfully longer, and it caused significant side effects, including a few deaths, the Food and Drug Administration said on december 04 in a review of the drug. The analysis by the agency’s staff appeared to dim the prospects that Avastin would win a approval as a treatment for breast cancer. Genentech’s stock fell $2.75, or 3.6 percent, yesterday, closing at $73.50.

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Treatments for mesothelioma are based on the stage of the disease and the patient’s age and general health. The most common treatments are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Multimodality therapy, the combination of surgery, radiation, and/or chemotherapy, is a common therapeutic approach for early stage mesothelioma. Trimodality therapy, in which all three of these modalities are used, is considered the most effective aggressive approach. Research is ongoing to find a cure and more effective treatments for mesothelioma. Clinical trials are ongoing to develop and test new and more effective treatments. Clinical trials should be discussed with your doctor before beginning treatment.

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Plastic surgery produces such amazing results that many people fail to take into account what is involved in the process. This can lead to unnecessary stress following a procedure.
The purpose of plastic surgery is really two fold. It is to improve an aspect of your body that you are unhappy with on a daily basis. By so doing, plastic surgery should also add to your mental well being since you are addressing some aspect of your body that makes you unhappy. While this sounds straightforward, many patients fail to seriously focus on what is going to occur during and after the procedure. This can lead to extreme stress and unhappiness following it.

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Cancer is a cruel disease and mesothelioma is one of the cruelest types of cancer known to man. I say that because after reading a personal story about a 73 year old wife and mother of seven children who passed away from mesothelioma, I realized that mesothelioma took her life through second hand exposure to asbestos. According to the National Cancer Institute, mesothelioma is a rare form of cancer in which cancerous cells are found in the mesothelium, a protective sac that covers most of the body’s internal organs. It is a rare type of cancer with only about 2,000 cases recorded in the United States each year.

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