HIFU - Could this be our cure for Cancer?

Private Health

A ground-breaking new cancer treatment, High Intensity Focused Ultrasound, (HIFU) is now available for private patients. Unlike most cancer treatments HIFU involves no surgery, has negligible side effects and requires no lengthy hospital stay.

For many years low intensity ultrasound has been used for imaging and it has been known that high power, high intensity ultrasound can affect human cells, but despite various attempts to harness this to treat cancer none have been successful.

....

A Consultant Surgeon at the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust, a world-leading healthcare and medical training institution, said: “HIFU is a very exciting new technology that may lead to the rewriting of text books on cancer treatments in the future”.
Emphasis mine

HIFU Cancer Treatment
Google News Links to HIFU

Does anyone else know about this treatment?

I have never heard of this treatment but I image I cannot get this on the NHS and I doubt it will available anytime soon but just out of curiousity would this perhaps put the days of chemo into history?

Ultrasound Therapeutics Limited (UTL)

The HAIFU System

As the first widely used equipment for extracorporeal tumour treatment with therapeutic ultrasound, the HAIFU system is a world–leading technology for the non-invasive treatment of tumours.

The Haifu System enables treatment of solid tumours using principles of surgical oncology. 3-D conformal technology allows ablation of both benign and malignant tumours. Benign tumours may be treated up to their margin, whereas malignant tumours are targeted to include specific volume of normal surrounding tissue, to ensure complete ablation.

The on-board software package allows the physician to see and capture images of the target tumour before integrating them with the therapy control system. This unique patented synthesis of programming and engineering allows the operator to image and treat from a single console, non-invasively ablating soft tissue tumours.

Very clever stuff eh. Apparantly this new breakthrough has already treated 8,000 people in the far east and has gained the universal CE mark for approval for clinical use but I believe is only available to people who can afford it for now, why is that? Is it becuase it hasn't gone under more testing or maybe the NHS simply cannot afford to spend the money on these machines?

I've been hearing lately that lots of jobs at the radcliffe among many other NHS trusts have had to be cut to save money but personally if they wanted to raise my tax money so that NHS can afford to buy these machines I would be more than happy to give a bit more, especially if the rewards are so bountiful, why hasn't this been in the news?

Could this be a conspiracy or is the NHS just strap for cash??

[edit on 1/6/06 by Nikolaos2030]

Hi,

I had not heard of this before but from a quick search on google I think it is undergoing clinical trials in the UK at the moment so is not available everywhere yet. I found an article saying that it had been approved for Prostate Cancer

www.nice.org.uk...

I would have thought that it was probably cheaper than surgery to remove the cancer as with surgery it takes a lot longer to recover so you will likely remain in hospital for longer and so cost the NHS more money. It looks very very good, hopefully it will be made available across the NHS for all cancers soon. Unfortunately from my experience of the NHS through renal service they tend to only look at the short term for saving so something like this is ignored even though it coulkd save them a lot more money in the long term.

good find

Nice find, this will validate one of my old threads

www.abovetopsecret.com...

seems to work, after all, doesn't it?