Out-of-Body Treatment For Liver Cancer

Tangential writes "This is amazing. Liver cancer, dangerous to treat and often deadly. Dosing that part of your body with enough radiation to cure the cancer often does as much harm as good. If they could just remove your liver, send it down to the lab to be treated and put it back in. An Italian MD has done just that." There's a story at New Scientist as well.

Comments

Re:Misleading article

[Dannon]

Thanks for the clarification... but now I've got this weird mental image of the doctor removing the patient's liver and sticking it in a microwave, one with the rotating plate to make sure it's 'evenly done all the way around'.

Minutes later: Ding!

Re:Fine for the liver, but..

[Single GNU Theory]

Other organs, like the lungs and especially the brain, can't be so readily removed.

Sure they can be. Reinstallation, however, is a bitch.

Heart and lung transplants happen all the time. So not only can they take the lungs out of a person, they can put them back in a completely different person! In order to do the procedure on lungs, the doctors would first put the patient on a heart-lung machine ("We've secretly replaced his blood with Folger's Crystals. Let's see if he can tell the differece!"), which would give them a little, er, breathing room regarding time.

The problem with doing brains is that it's still a problem to heal damage to central nervous system nerves.