TREATMENT OF CANCER

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27750, 30 August 1955, Page 12

TREATMENT OF CANCER

VIEWS OF VISITING SPECIALISTS

THREE KNOWN METHODS COMPLEMENTARY

(New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, August 29. The three known ways of treating cancer—surgery, radio-therapy and the recently - developed chemo - therapy, were not competitive but complementary, two English cancer specialists. Professor B. W. Windeyer, professor of radiology at the University of London and head of the Radio-therapy Institute of Middlesex Hospital, and Sir Stanford Cade, senior surgeon at Westminster Hospital, said today. The two specialists have come to New Zealand at the invitation of the British Empire Cancer Campaign Society to lecture doctors on the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. They will visit the main centres. Sir Stanford Cade and Professor Windeyer said that the supervoltage X-ray equipment at Christchurch, Dunedin and Auckland wbuld have had a definite place in the treatment of cancer, but it had not been used long enough in Egland to enable them to quote any statistics on the improved cure rate. “It is an extension of the value of radio-therapy," Professor Windeyer said. “It gives greater accuracy and less discomfort for the patient. ’ The equipment, he said, was expensive to maintain. “And you need a more elaborate team to run it” Although radio-therapy had greatly improved, there would always be scope for surgery, the two specialists added. Radio-active isotopes, made in the atomic laboratories, were valuable adjuncts to radio-therapy. There were some useful substitutes for radium and radio-active isotopes had extended the of this kind of treatment very greatly. One example was radio-active cobalt. The “cobalt bomb” was the equivalent of a 3.000,000-volt plant. Isotopes were much cheaper than radium and enabled countries which did not have —y-or could not afford—sufficient quantities of radium, to give the same kind of treatment, they said.