FYI

I found this on a reputable breast cancer site and thought I would pass it on.

.Hot Chemotherapy Bath
8/13/2011 (9:36:09am)Tags: noneComments: (0)

This is an article from the New York Times about a new chemotherapy technique being used for colorectal and ovarian cancers (blessedly, not for breast). I just heard about it when I read this, and am still quaking. My oncologist husband explained the theory that high temperatures may increase the efficacy of the drugs. Whatever treatment you had, you likely will be grateful that it was what it was rather than this procedure. It sounds pretty awful, but here it is. Per usual, I give you the beginning and a link:


Hot Chemotherapy Bath: Patients See Hope, Critics Hold Doubts

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
A pump delivering hot chemotherapy to the abdomen.
By ANDREW POLLACK

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.”

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