Hot Chemotherapy Bath: Patients See Hope, Critics Hold Doubts

[Chemisse]

Chemotherapy Bath: Patients See Hope, Critics Hold Doubts


SAN DIEGO — This is cancer therapy at its most aggressive, a treatment patients liken to being filleted, disemboweled and then bathed in hot poison. The therapy, which couples extensive abdominal surgery with blasts of heated chemotherapy to the abdominal cavity and its organs, was once a niche procedure used mainly against rare cancers of the appendix. Most academic medical centers shunned it.

More recently, as competition for patients and treatments intensifies, an increasing number of the nation’s leading medical centers has been offering the costly — and controversial — therapy to patients with the more common colorectal or ovarian cancers. And some hospitals are even publicizing the treatment as a hot “chemo bath.”

To critics, the therapy is merely the latest example of one that catches on with little evidence that it really works. “We’re practicing this technique that has almost no basis in science,” said Dr. David P. Ryan, clinical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.

But to some patients, the procedure, however grueling and invasive, represents their best hope for survival: “It’s throwing everything but the kitchen sink at cancer,” said Gloria Borges, a 29-year-old Los Angeles lawyer who had her colon cancer treated with what she called the “pick it out, pour it in” procedure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/12/business/heated-chemotherapy-bath-may-be-only-hope-for-some-cancer-patients.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Is it really worth all this? The procedure added an average of 10 months to the lives of cancer patients in one study, but recovering from it (assuming you are not one of the 8 percent who died in that same study) can take up to 6 months!

I have never had cancer (I am now knocking on my wooden desk - lol) but it seems to me that one would be better off foregoing some of these extreme and debilitating treatments that only prolong a pretty miserable life by a few months. This seems almost predatory in its exploitation of the hopes and fears of those who have cancer.

[Raschel]

1. sounds brutal. I have been going through treatments for almost three years now, I've changed my diet

as well. Most of the treatments have been tolerable. I can't say what I'd do at the point of last resort. Never know, we do a lot to avoid dying.

[Chemisse]

3. I know; that's the thing.

I can sit here and say I would never do this or that, that it is not worth it, etc. But how can I really know what I would do for a little extra time?

[bemildred]

2. I prefer to give the money to my family. nt