Treatment for Mesothelioma

As far as treatment for mesothelioma, I am not going to include much here about the standard treatments because - after all - this is the natural pain relief guide website.

I will just note a couple of things and then describe one mainstream approach that shows promise. Medicine has found that the prognosis for cases of malignant mesothelioma remains poor. It has been found that patients receiving vitamin supplementation along with their chemo treatments did better - I'm not surprised. Here is the standard approach that shows some progress compared to the usual cut, burn and poison as a treatment for mesothelioma:

Hyperthermia Therapy Offers Alternative to Chemotherapy
Engineers at Virginia Tech and Jadavpur University in India have reported some success in the use of elevated heat (hyperthermia) to kill cancerous tumors.

They found that a temperature of about 41 C was enough to slow the growth of tumor cells. They used ferrofluids to develop a process that can increase the temperature within a tumor while leaving surrounding tissue at a safe temperature.

A ferrofluid is a liquid that exhibits high magnetization in a magnetic field. Ishwar Puri, a Virginia Tech professor involved with the study: "These fluids can then be magnetically targeted to cancerous tissues after intravenous application."

The size of the magnetic nanoparticles (a few billionths of a meter) is such that they are only capable of slipping into highly-permeable tumor cells and not normal cells.

Once injected, a high-frequency alternating magnetic field heats the nanoparticles in the ferrofluid to a temperature of up to 56 C.

According to Puri, "The ideal hyperthermia treatment sufficiently increases the temperature of the tumor cells for about 30 minutes while maintaining the healthy tissue temperature below 41 degrees Celsius."

Preliminary research suggests the elevated temperatures may be effective against other cancers. Because this method can be targeted to the tumor and has minimal effect on surrounding healthy tissue, it has fewer side effects than chemotherapy. The Virginia Tech team will be doing further testing. (Sources: Toronto Sun, Eureka Alert, Dailytech.com)

I know of a young man who recovered from cancer by treating himself naturally including hyperthermia treatments. But no nanoparticles - he lay in a bathtub of hot water! (Note however, that even that needs to be done correctly and with supervision because of the need to keep the head cool and the danger of fainting.)

I will mention one other mainstream treatment because it supports the hyperthermia approach as a treatment for mesothelioma.

It is called Heated Intraoperative Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy and was developed by Paul Sugarbaker at the Washington Cancer Institute. This procedure involves the surgeon removing as much of the tumor as possible and then directly treating the tissues with a chemotherapy agent heated to between 40 and 48°C for 60 to 120 minutes. The technique allows the administration of high concentrations of selected drugs directly into the affected abdominal and pelvic surfaces. Heating the chemotherapy agent increases tissue penetration. Also, heating itself damages the malignant cells more than the normal cells.

This "... heating ... damages the malignant cells ..." supports the idea of using heat on its own - just like the young man I spoke of. (Of course, it normally takes much more action than that to deal with cancer.)

If you are looking for a treatment for mesothelioma or any other cancer, do your own research in conjunction with your health care provider. Learn all you can and do as much as your can to improve your general health. Give your body every advantage you can and it will work for you in its attempt to recover health.

If you are going to be investigating the mainstream approaches to treatment for mesothelioma, I would suggest you look at http://www.mesotheliomaweb.org