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Monday, October 29, 2012

Surgery vs. alternative medicine to battle cancer


Updated: Wednesday, 26 Oct 2011, 3:49 PM EDT
Published : Wednesday, 26 Oct 2011, 3:49 PM EDT
New Haven, Conn. (WTNH) - Late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs chose alternative therapies to battle cancer.
Jobs chose alternative therapies to battle a neuro-endocrine tumor that started in the pancreas. Surgery is generally recommended, but he delayed that procedure.

Dr. Howard Hochster specializes in gastro-intestinal cancers at Yale Cancer Center.
Dr. Hochster said, "If it's confined to the pancreas, or very localized, then it's removed surgically wherever in the body these tumors arise, a nice percentage of them are curable with surgery alone."

Jobs lived 8 years after his diagnosis.
In Jobs' biography that went on sale Monday, the writer says he tried non-traditional methods.

"I would not necessarily discourage people from taking them, but I don't think they can be used as therapy per say," said Dr. Hochster. "Unfortunately, with these alternative therapies, they are just not cancer treatments, that's why they are alternative, because they have been tried generally for many years, many decades, many centuries sometimes, but we can't show that they actually are therapeutically beneficial in any responsible medical clinical trial."

Dr. Hochster points out cancer treatments are similar to alternative practices in that many are derived from Mother Nature.

"One of the things about cancer treatments is that we get a lot of drugs through plants and many of them started out as plant extracts. The chemotherapy drug Taxol is a good example, it comes from the bark of Yew trees," explained Dr. Hochster.

Maryann Scinto has pancreatic cancer and is undergoing chemo. She chose the targeted therapy program offered at Yale that began with surgery.

"These spots that they found in August were so minute and then the scan beginning in October show them dormant, so this stuff is doing its job," said Scinto.

There are a number of clinical trials at Yale involving new molecular therapies that Dr. Hochster says are designed to help patients live the best for the longest time period possible.

http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/health/surgery-vs.-alternative-medicine-to-battle-cancer

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