Perhaps the best strategy would be that that was recently announced
where they fuse the patient's own dendritic cells with the tumor
cells and reinject them into the body. This causes the dendritic
cells to display the mutated proteins from the cancer cells to the
immune system and cause an amplification of the immune system cells
that can react with and potentially kill the cancer cells. This
was being used, I believe, with kidney cancer and perhaps one
other type, so it might take some convincing to talk the
physicians involved to consider your case.
While I keep hearing rumors about metastasis inhibitors, I'm unsure
whether any have made it out of the lab stages into clinical trials.
However, there *are* on the order ofi a dozen different angiogenesis
inhibitors in clinical trials. If you could get your sister into one
of these you would have a 50:50 chance of getting a drug that could keep
the tumors in the "micro" stages. I am sure that some web searches
and/or calls to the pharmaceutical companies would turn up who
is running these trials.
The therapies listed above have properties that they are relatively
"non-toxic", in contrast to radio/chemo cancer treatments.
There are strong arguments for methods such as meditation
or comic relief (anything that reduces stress, since stress
turns down your immune system and that could allow the cancer
to spread and grow more easily). {See many refs by R. Sapolsky}
I would not however recomend any "faith" methods because they
would by their very nature "disempower" the individual and
"empower" a force beyond their control. I could imagine
a scenario where belief in external powers, could cause
sufficient stress reduction that the cancer could be
dealt with by the natural defenses in the body, but to my
way of thinking that is a very long shot and highly dependent
on the psychology and belief system of the individual.
As a last resort, there is always cryonics.
If you cannot find any references or information on these,
let me know and I'll try to dig deeper into my memory banks...
Robert
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:06:10 MDT