Brain Cancer Patients Live Longer By Sending Electric Fields Through Their Heads (ieee.org) 74
IEEE Spectrum reports on a "radical new weapon" against brain tumors -- only available since 2015. They profile a typical patient who "wears electrodes on her head all day and night to send an electric field through her brain, trying to prevent any leftover tumor cells from multiplying [and] goes about her business with a shaved head plastered with electrodes, which are connected by wires to a bulky generator she carries in a shoulder bag."
the_newsbeagle writes:
The Optune system, which bathes the brain tumor in an AC electric field, is the first new treatment to come along that seems to extend some patients' lives. New data on survival rates from a major clinical trial showed that 43% of patients who used Optune were still alive at the 2-year mark, compared to 30% of patients on the standard treatment regimen. At the 4-year mark, the survival rates were 17% for Optune patients and 10% for the others.
Patients have to re-shave their heads every few days and re-apply all the electrodes, but that's never been a problem, according to one patient. "If you have a condition which has no cure, it's a great motivator."
Patients have to re-shave their heads every few days and re-apply all the electrodes, but that's never been a problem, according to one patient. "If you have a condition which has no cure, it's a great motivator."
Interesting (Score:1)
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Too soon.
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Is it just me or are the ACs getting even more incomprehensible lately?
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I'm not unconvivced some are just Markov chain bots.
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"Markov" sounds like a Russian name. Hmm.
So... electromagnetic fields actually do something (Score:3, Interesting)
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They are not ionizing.
You'll be fine.
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Induced currents in non grounded conducting medium. The energy has got to go somewhere. It's greater than 10,000 times more than the power you might encounter from say your cell phone, and significantly more than that for an overhead power line. Don't sit in a microwave oven. It will not end well.
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>Learn how specific absorption works
I spent long enough designing phones and getting them tested for SAR limits.
I was doing a simple comparison of the 1000W being dumped in a microwave oven bouncing around constrained in a chamber compared to the 250mW being emitted by your phone into open air. It's approximate.
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>Again it's about the length of time you spend in close proximity with the emitter more than it is the wattage inside the oven, obviously.
Not if we are talking about making sparks.
As for your other concerns, there's a massive amount of epidemiological research that has failed to show your concerns have basis in fact.
>Read more before you try to say this is completely studied, completely safe
I said no such thing. Absolutes are improper assertions to make in a field with uncertainties.
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Please tell me how come things spark in a microwave oven.
"Research shows that your microwave oven .. in fact will threaten your health by violently ripping the molecules in your food apart, rendering some nutrients inert, at best, and carcinogenic at its worst."
Don't even worry [mercola.com] about the sparks.
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Re:So... electromagnetic fields actually do someth (Score:4, Insightful)
Have they everheard about what a frying pan does to food? A barbecue? Just plain boiling water?
The site is completely inane. You should feel ashamed forquoting it. Like this bit:
"Even when the microwave oven is working correctly, the microwave levels within the kitchen are likely to be significantly higher than those from any nearby cellular phone base-stations."
Yes. Duh. Radiation from phone base stations is incredibly low in the average home. A phone, with its specialized single-purpose detector, often has trouble catching the signal. So yes, even with the microwave oven working correctly, the microwave levels are above zero. Ooooh scaaary.
You thoroughly earned a good flaming.
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Direct contact electrodes aren't putting in an EM field, they're putting in an electric current.
No Evidence Effect is Real (Score:2)
When they're trying to calm us down its always "the fields do nothing, shut up, you're fine. They're non ionizing".
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That said, you do start with small samples to figure out how big the real trial should be. If the outcome would have been 35%, you'd know to set up a much bigger trial to find out if that 5% improvement was significant. Proving 13% is a lot easier.
Insert Subject Here (Score:2)
Over the final two years, out of the survivors from the first two years,
about 63% of optune users died, and about 66% of standard regimen patients died.
Maybe it just buys time, maybe the cancer adapts, maybe it just needs to be refined.
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Maybe it's placebo effect - placebo can be stronger than this. (FWIW, if placebo effect can cure me, I'll take it.)
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Maybe it's placebo effect - placebo can be stronger than this. (FWIW, if placebo effect can cure me, I'll take it.)
It could be that since optune users had to go through some sort of regimen, they disciplined themselves to look after themselves better in other ways too.
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Maybe it's placebo effect - placebo can be stronger than this. (FWIW, if placebo effect can cure me, I'll take it.)
It could be that since optune users had to go through some sort of regimen, they disciplined themselves to look after themselves better in other ways too.
One of the (many) hidden benefits of sham treatment.
So they should just use their cell phone? (Score:1)
Interesting Approach (Score:2)
I had to 'translate' some of this article for my wife (MD) since it was in IEEE rather than the medical journals she's used to.
The interesting approach is using the cells' EM properties rather than it's chemical ones. FDA approval aside given a specific set of instructions this should be trivial for any college student to re-create. Places on earth where it's difficult to get 'fresh' Chemo drugs to or don't have the infastructure to support radiation or other conventional treatements. TENS units have been a
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I seriously doubt that "cancer has a harmonic frequency" in the traditional sense of the Tacoma Narrows bridge's harmonic frequency.
There may be a range of frequencies that have some effect, with a statistical peak somewhere in there. It may also be simple placebo effect, which I'd like to point out does not make those not-dead people dead, placebo effect is real, it is strong, and if it's the most effective treatment available, I'd take it. (Side effects also tend to be minimal...)
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Re:Not a proper study, get this astroturf out of h (Score:4, Insightful)
There are serious ethical concerns with giving a placebo where giving no treatment is substantially worse. You'd basically be condemning them to a death if you did that. That's why, in these kinds of circumstances, the experimental treatment is compared to the current accepted standard of treatment.
This kind of treatment has been in the experimental phases since at least 2011, and has undergone clinical trials;
http://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10... [ascopubs.org]
http://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10... [ascopubs.org]
And I believe this link, from 2011, is a press release announcing the approval of the trial discussed in this particular story. I'm not 100% sure, but the names and terminology match up...
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/... [fda.gov]
=Smidge=
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If you're informed that you're getting placebo then it's not placebo anymore. It is literally impossible to have informed consent in a placebo controlled trial.
And even if you phrase it like, "you MIGHT get a placebo" that still doesn't cover you.
It must come as quite a shock that there are rather strict ethical guidelines when it comes to experimenting on humans, born mostly out of a very ugly history of malpractice.
http://www.pcrm.org/research/h... [pcrm.org]
Using humans as lab rats is simply not an option.
=Smidge=
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Wrong. Even when patients are informed that they are receiving a placebo, it has an effect. Want proof? [harvard.edu]
Dr. Ted J. Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has been studying placebos for more than 20 years. His most recent work on these “open-label placebos,” as they’re called, is fascinating. I had a chance to interview him in person earlier this year.
In one study, Kaptchuk looked at people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a common condition that causes abdominal cramping and diarrhea or constipation that can be debilitating for many. Half of the study volunteers were told they were getting an “open-label” placebo and the others got nothing at all. He found that there was a dramatic and significant improvement in the placebo group’s IBS symptoms, even though they were explicitly told they were getting a “sugar pill” without any active medication.
Also, nice way to be intentionally silly - you don't tell them that they are receiving a placebo - you inform them that they will receive either the placebo or the treatment being tested. You don't have to tell them which. Just that the distribution will be at random.
Placebos are often considered “fake” treatments. You may have heard them described as “sugar pills.” They usually take the form of pills, injections, or even entire procedures that are used in clinical trials to test “real” treatments. For example, one group of study participants is given an active drug and another group is given a placebo, which looks exactly like the active medication but is completely inactive. The participants can’t tell whether they’re getting the fake drug or the real drug. The researchers wait to see if the people taking the real one do better (or worse) than those taking the fake one.
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Hmm... what's the difference between Irritable bowel syndrome and brain cancer? Can you think of any? Something that might make it acceptable to give one a placebo and not the other?
=Smidge=
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Yes it does, that's why it's called ethics.
As in, it's unethical to take a course of action that you know will result in permanent harm to the patient.
Not treating IBS can potentially result in non-life-threatening discomfort. With patient consent that's an ethically acceptable risk.
Not treating brain cancer can potentially result in mental disability and death. It is not ethically acceptable to provide no treatment when you KNOW that no treatment will result in an unacceptable outcome. So you provide the s
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Seeing as 90% of all medical research is flawed [time.com], (and no, this is not some crank - it's pretty much accepted in research because of the evidence, as well as researchers personal knowledge/experience of bad studies we need to test against placebos, because some of the supposedly beneficial treatments are later found to be harmful.
Remember thalidomide? Or more recently, the panic over hormone replacement therapy because the biggest, best trial of HRT ever was started prematurely because it purported to show
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Nothing you just wrote about would be resolved if we were to let patients die from lack of treatment. Hell, none of what you wrote about is even comparable, for exactly the reasons I've already explained.
I really don't understand why you're having this difficulty: If giving no treatment carries a known high risk of harm to the patient, then no treatment is not an ethical option.
I'm not dismissing the efficacy and usefulness of placebo-controlled trials. I'm saying it's unethical to not treat patients with f
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Also, since this is a test, you don't know if the placebo is less dangerous than the treatment being tested - or you wouldn't need to run the test. Your arguments are not based in law, nor are they in agreement with the physician's code of ethics, which works by informed consent in such cases.
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our arguments are not based in law, nor are they in agreement with the physician's code of ethics, which works by informed consent in such cases.
I've already posted a couple of links explaining the history, the law, and the prevailing practice of ethics in medical research... which you very obviously have not bothered to read if you're making comments like that.
=Smidge=
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Your arguments are bullshit when it comes to experimental treatments. People can give consent after being informed that the treatment may make their disease or condition worse, or even kill them.
The same applies to people in drug trials. In blind tests, you cannot tell people whether they will receive the test treatment or not, and if you haven't noticed, All consent forms for treatment, even in hospitals, contain the stipulation that the patient has been informed of any risks (and "any risks" includes dea
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That's not the issue. Active comparitors are standard and make sense: you don't really care anymore whether something works, you care whether it works better than what's available.
The issue here is that they decided not to give the patients who were on only chemo a fake head zapper to carry around for "ethical reasons." In a field where you have a serious conversation about whether you should do sham open chest surgery or not, it's suspicious that they considered carrying around a shoulder bag to be ethic
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Optune (Score:2)
No better than an active placebo. (Score:2)
Billing scam (Score:1)