Untitled

Hokitika Guardian, 12 July 1928, Page 2

Of twenty patients suffering from the inoperable and necessarily fatal forms of cancer selected by tlie surgeons of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, for radio-therapy treatment at Sydney University clinic, eight were selected (as volunteers) byi tho doctors, and five will shortly leave, cured by the combination of injection of salt of lead, X-ray and radium, which has been called radio-therapy. Full details, reports a. correspondent, are at present refused, as until the special apparatus and accommodation is completed, as it is expected to lie bv the end of the year, the authorities fear a rush of patients and possible delay and disappointments. Lead colloid lias already produced satisfactory results in England, but a warning was issued as to the danger of its use whilst no more than an experiment. Tlie medical journals have reported cures by means of radium, chiefly in cases of cancer of the breast, and X-rays have long been known to have a destructive effect upon cancerous tissue. In the cases quoted from Sydney the cancer growths are said to have been “utterly destroyed.” Sydney commenced endowed research in this disease in 1921, and these are the first five cases ot serious and inoperable cancer reported as cured. It will be some months yet liofore many cases can bo received. “While there is no doubt of the success of the cures in the case of five patients." says Dr Stephens, “it is necessary to warn the public that this must not lo taken to mean that a definite cancer cure for every case has been discovered. The importance! of tho cures is that they have resulted from the application of new radiotherapy methods, and thus narrowed in an astounding degree the field of research. If tho scientists can prove what form of treatment among the many they used on the patients was responsible for the cure, they will then have .solved tho problem that has for so long baffled the brightest intellects of medical science.”