USE OF RADIUM

Southland Times, Issue 25342, 22 July 1935, Page 8

USE OF RADIUM

CANCER TREATMENT “IN THE MELTING POT” DR. FOSTER’S COMMENTS (Per United Press Association.) Christchurch, July 21. “Radium treatment of cancer is in the melting pot” said Dr P. Stanley Foster, who returned to Christchurch yesterday, in summarizing the experience he gained at the leading hospitals in Canada and the United States which he visited during a recent tour. In some cases excellent results were being obtained with radium, he said, but at the Toronto general hospital, which had probably the finest record for research in the British Empire, the specialists were so unhappy about the results obtained with radium that they had sent one of their staff to “spy out the land” in Europe and determine whether better results were being obtained there. Instead of direct metallic radium treatment radium , emanations from evanescent substances which were encased in gold shells and which soon lost their potency were being used at the Memorial Hospital in New York. A similar method had been in use in Christchurch, said Dr Foster, the shells being “planted” by means of tubes in parts of the body which were difficult of access. A deep X-ray treatment had also been developed in New York concerning which research workers were very hopeful. DUNEDIN DOCTOR’S VIEWS. In an interview with an Evening Star reporter on the subject Dr A. S. Moody, who returned to Dunedin on Friday night after a tour abroad, summed up his impressions by saying:— “After I had been shown recentlycompleted statistics dealing with the treatment of cancer by surgical means and by radium I put a direct question to the director of one of the largest surgical clinics in Europe. I asked what line of treatment he would follow if he were treating one of his own relatives. His answer came rather reluctantly. ‘I would operate,’ he said. “Provided a case came under notice reasonably early,” added Dr Moody, “radium properly applied has its uses. In inoperable cases and in some special cases it can compete successfully with operations.”