(ARA) – Hearing the word cancer from a doctor can change a patient’s life. While cancer treatments such as radiation therapy save millions of lives each year, those who undergo these widely used therapies can suffer serious short- and long-term side effects.
For many cancer patients, there is an alternative to radiation therapy – one that has few, if any side effects and allows most patients to go on with their day-to-day activities and lead a normal life while undergoing treatment. Proton therapy has been successfully used to treat cancer for decades, but because there are only a handful of centers in the U.S. offering the therapy, many doctors remain unaware of the treatment and its benefits
Richard Gordon of Oklahoma was one of the 12 million people diagnosed with cancer last year. He also was one of more than 6,000 patients treated last year with proton therapy.
At 59, Gordon was vital, healthy and did all the things the experts said he should do – eat right, exercise often, maintain a good weight and avoid smoking – yet a routine checkup discovered aggressive prostate cancer. At the advice of his physician, Gordon underwent a prostatectomy and then began exploring post-operative treatment options. The aggressiveness of his cancer prompted doctors to advise him to have radiation.
“After learning about the permanent damage to my healthy tissue and other side effects, I decided not to pursue radiation therapy,” says Gordon.
As Gordon was weighing his treatment options, he noticed a large medical building under construction near his office in Oklahoma City. After learning that it was the new ProCure Proton Therapy Center, Gordon researched proton therapy and decided he wanted to learn more. After meeting with the Center’s manager of patient services he decided to pursue proton therapy.
Gordon underwent treatment at the ProCure Proton Therapy Center in Oklahoma City, the sixth center to open in the U.S. Plans to build more than a dozen other proton centers have been announced, including a ProCure center in Illinois that will be treating patients before the end of the year.
Studies have shown proton therapy to be effective in treating a number of types of cancer, including prostate, brain, head and neck, central nervous system and lung, as well as those that cannot be completely removed by surgery. It is particularly useful in treating childhood cancers because proton therapy causes less damage to young, healthy, developing tissue than other forms of radiation therapy.
Like standard radiation therapy that uses X-ray radiation, proton therapy kills cancer tumor cells by preventing them from dividing and growing. Unlike X-ray radiation, protons deposit most of their energy directly in the cancer tumor, meaning patients can receive higher, more effective doses, with less damage to healthy tissues near the tumor.
“My treatments would start at 8 a.m. I would be done by 8:30 and in the office, going about my regular day by 9,” Gordon says. “I felt like a healthy person while I was going through proton therapy.”
To learn more about the advantages of proton therapy, visit www.procure.com.or the home page of National Association for Proton Therapy at www.proton-therapy.org.
