Thursday, February 14, 2008

POTENTIAL CANCER CURE: STIMULATING BODY'S IMMUNE SYSTEM TO KILL CANCER CELLS

A Digg.com post mentions yet another "damn interesting" article - A Cancer Cure Most Doctors Won't Tell You About - from the website http://www.damninteresting.com/ :

During the early 1900's, Dr. William Coley re-discovered a cancer treatment that was surprisingly effective. By infecting tumors with common bacteria, Coley learned the body could be triggered to kill off cancerous tumors. Conventional modern medicine rarely employs Coley ’s technique today for 1 reason: they still don't understand how it works.

Of course, there is (at least) one caveat: the doctors using this technique must make sure the bacterial infection does not turn out to be worse of a problem than the original cancer. But the general idea of using a foreign entity (bacteria) to trigger the body's natural defense mechanisms (fever, white blood cells' destroying foreign pathogens, etc.) does seem to make sense, especially when every other "normal" treatment has been tried without success.

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