8737
0
Posted on Oct 17, 2006, 6 a.m.
By Bill Freeman
Lung cancer is the leading cause of death in both men and women. Until now, the only treatment has been painful and difficult surgery to remove the cancerous tumor. But now, doctors have found a painless way to treat patients who don't qualify for surgery. It sounds too good to be true, but it's happening and saving lives. "When you hear 'cancer,' that's a death sentence. And especially lung cancer," JoAnn Schwab says. She not only beat stage one lung cancer, she feels great and is working every day.
Schwab wasn't a candidate for major surgery because it would have caused too much damage to her already frail lung. So doctors turned to a new treatment called CyberKnife.
"We're amazed by what it can accomplish," says radiation oncologist Brian Collins, M.D.
The CyberKnife is a robotic arm with a radiation device on the end. Patients lay on a table, and the machine tracks the tumor as they breathe with small gold seeds. They're implanted around the tumor during a biopsy. The system is so precise, patients can receive three-times the normal amount of radiation.
Dr. Collins, of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C., tells Ivanhoe, "We can target the beam and follow the tumor therefore only delivering radiation to the tumor and not to the normal lung."
Instead of six weeks of standard radiation, it takes just three CyberKnife treatments for one or two weeks to make tumors like this black spot disappear. There's no pain and no real side effects.
"The major concern of the patients who've had the CyberKnife has been whether they've been treated at all because the side effects are so minimal," Dr. Collins says.
It worked on Schwab. Her cancer is gone. And she hopes it can also help some of the 170,000 people who die from this deadly cancer each year.
The CyberKnife radiation system can also be used on patients with pancreatic and liver tumors. Doctors still view surgery as the best option for stage one lung cancer, but the CyberKnife can be an easier solution for those who aren't candidates for surgery. It can also be used on patients with more advanced stages of cancer, but will likely only save a patient's life who has stage one.
