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Brain Cancer Patients Live Longer By Sending Electric Fields Through Their Heads (ieee.org)
IEEE Spectrum reports on a "radical new weapon" against brain tumors -- only available since 2015. They profile a typical patient who "wears electrodes on her head all day and night to send an electric field through her brain, trying to prevent any leftover tumor cells from multiplying [and] goes about her business with a shaved head plastered with electrodes, which are connected by wires to a bulky generator she carries in a shoulder bag."
the_newsbeagle writes:
The Optune system, which bathes the brain tumor in an AC electric field, is the first new treatment to come along that seems to extend some patients' lives. New data on survival rates from a major clinical trial showed that 43% of patients who used Optune were still alive at the 2-year mark, compared to 30% of patients on the standard treatment regimen. At the 4-year mark, the survival rates were 17% for Optune patients and 10% for the others.
Patients have to re-shave their heads every few days and re-apply all the electrodes, but that's never been a problem, according to one patient. "If you have a condition which has no cure, it's a great motivator."
Patients have to re-shave their heads every few days and re-apply all the electrodes, but that's never been a problem, according to one patient. "If you have a condition which has no cure, it's a great motivator."
Because Cancer hertz everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Ha ha! Explain that!
if you wanna find people responsible for activatingg ddos attack in Brazil, start investigating evangelists from "igreja universal". they get cranky when their masks fall off.
When they're trying to calm us down its always "the fields do nothing, shut up, you're fine. They're non ionizing".
They are not ionizing.
You'll be fine.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Please tell me how come things spark in a microwave oven.
Do you know what 'ionizing radiation' means?
Over the first two years, 57% of optune users died, compared to 70% of standard regimen patients.
Over the final two years, out of the survivors from the first two years,
about 63% of optune users died, and about 66% of standard regimen patients died.
Maybe it just buys time, maybe the cancer adapts, maybe it just needs to be refined.
Induced currents in non grounded conducting medium. The energy has got to go somewhere. It's greater than 10,000 times more than the power you might encounter from say your cell phone, and significantly more than that for an overhead power line. Don't sit in a microwave oven. It will not end well.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Wouldn't just talking on their cell phone all day have the same effect?
Please tell me how come things spark in a microwave oven.
"Research shows that your microwave oven .. in fact will threaten your health by violently ripping the molecules in your food apart, rendering some nutrients inert, at best, and carcinogenic at its worst."
Don't even worry about the sparks.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I had to 'translate' some of this article for my wife (MD) since it was in IEEE rather than the medical journals she's used to.
The interesting approach is using the cells' EM properties rather than it's chemical ones. FDA approval aside given a specific set of instructions this should be trivial for any college student to re-create. Places on earth where it's difficult to get 'fresh' Chemo drugs to or don't have the infastructure to support radiation or other conventional treatements. TENS units have been around for a while and aren't that big.
Now we just need to find the harmonic frequency of all the other types of cancer.
It's pure Tinkerbell magic, left behind by previously constipated Sparkle.
Nothing to see here, move along:
"[...] the trial couldn’t be sham-controlled, which is considered the gold standard for medical trials, since it wasn’t appropriate for some patients to be burdened with wearable gear yet only receive sham treatment."
How does one rip molecules apart non-violently?
Because of induced electrical fields?
Ezekiel 23:20
You politely ask the molecule to split.
Ezekiel 23:20
Have they everheard about what a frying pan does to food? A barbecue? Just plain boiling water?
The site is completely inane. You should feel ashamed forquoting it. Like this bit:
"Even when the microwave oven is working correctly, the microwave levels within the kitchen are likely to be significantly higher than those from any nearby cellular phone base-stations."
Yes. Duh. Radiation from phone base stations is incredibly low in the average home. A phone, with its specialized single-purpose detector, often has trouble catching the signal. So yes, even with the microwave oven working correctly, the microwave levels are above zero. Ooooh scaaary.
You thoroughly earned a good flaming.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Anyone who cites Mercola, a quack of the same calibre of Dr Oz, needs to take their head out of the microwave ...
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Why in the world wasn't it "appropriate?" So giving everyone a treatment that you don't know works is somehow more appropriate than giving half a placebo, which will probably be just as effective (prove otherwise by doing a proper study or stfu).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Correct. Currents flowing in organic liquids are by definition ions.
There are serious ethical concerns with giving a placebo where giving no treatment is substantially worse. You'd basically be condemning them to a death if you did that. That's why, in these kinds of circumstances, the experimental treatment is compared to the current accepted standard of treatment.
This kind of treatment has been in the experimental phases since at least 2011, and has undergone clinical trials;
http://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10...
http://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10...
And I believe this link, from 2011, is a press release announcing the approval of the trial discussed in this particular story. I'm not 100% sure, but the names and terminology match up...
http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/...
=Smidge=
" It's greater than 10,000 times more than the power you might encounter from say your cell phone" Learn how specific absorption works, don't pontificate like a derp. Being near a microwave is not advised for pacemaker patients, and that's a function of the inverse square of distance to the emitter. You put a cell phone right up to your head and leave it there for long-term (very long in some cases) exposure. Most people don't stand around a running microwave all day, LOTS of people sleep with cell phones to their face ALL NIGHT and that's deemed "safe" - until you actually read about it. Which you haven't.
And if they can induce enough voltage to spark over in air, guess they might induce enough voltage to ionize some molecules here and there in a liquid...
I remember when it was just a hard disk defraggler, and the version that everybody shared around had a bug where it could duplicate the last sector of a directory if it ended on a sector boundary. Nostalgia, man.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Stick your head in the microwave and get yourself a tan.
Dare to be stupid.
From TFS it would seem that these aren't RF fields, instead they're talking about actual AC current flowing through the brain. I've yet to meet anyone claiming that AC current is generally harmless.
Direct contact electrodes aren't putting in an EM field, they're putting in an electric current.
>Learn how specific absorption works
I spent long enough designing phones and getting them tested for SAR limits.
I was doing a simple comparison of the 1000W being dumped in a microwave oven bouncing around constrained in a chamber compared to the 250mW being emitted by your phone into open air. It's approximate.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
My thinking was that all the trial patients should have been forced to go through the onerous EM exercise with a random half actually getting the EM treatment in addition to everyone receiving standard treatment. I don't think this was the case and it's possible that there were selection biases towards those who were able choose(?) to go through the EM therapy. If there was some conflict with EM therapy and the standard treatment then some placebo for standard treatment should be used as well. The idea of course is that nobody knows or can tell who's getting what treatment during the trial. How practical that is and the ethics involved are above my pay grade.
Correct. Currents flowing in organic liquids are by definition ions.
And still ionizing is something totally different. The fields work on already ionized particles. They don't create these.
They didn't have any control to compare the results against, so I call bullshit.
But placebos may in fact be better than the treatment being tested - or the treatment being tested may make things worse, so there is no moral or ethical dilemma. As long as there's informed consent, what is your problem?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Pick one :(
In a test, you're told that you might be in one of two groups - the one receiving the treatment or the one receiving the dummy. The treatment may carry more or less risk, but that's the way it is, and they say that too. Anything else is pretty much useless.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Again it's about the length of time you spend in close proximity with the emitter more than it is the wattage inside the oven, obviously.
Microwave ovens are not proven safe to be within inches of for multiple hours at a time, whereas people are trying to say a cell phone is "fine" because the power is less and are missing the entire point of the duration of and distance from the exposure. You do not put your balls within inches of a microwave oven. You do however carry a cell phone in your pocket, all day. Yes, it's less power. That doesn't mean it has zero effect nor does your claim that you 'design cell phones' diminish anything about this. Specifically with brain physiology, there is an amyloid called albumin that can be made to cross the blood-brain barrier when exposed to this type of radiation and it can cause bonded free radicals to go along for the ride - and they become trapped in the brain without any mechanism for expulsion.
Read more before you try to say this is completely studied, completely safe, or not worth the concern. Because you're wrong on all counts.
And a stretched rectum is NOT a vagina.
>Again it's about the length of time you spend in close proximity with the emitter more than it is the wattage inside the oven, obviously.
Not if we are talking about making sparks.
As for your other concerns, there's a massive amount of epidemiological research that has failed to show your concerns have basis in fact.
>Read more before you try to say this is completely studied, completely safe
I said no such thing. Absolutes are improper assertions to make in a field with uncertainties.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
If you don't know why this is different than electromagnetic radiation then I am truly ashamed for you. Please hand in your geek-junior card. They are talking about actually running ac electrical current through your head. NOT hooking up a transmitter antenna to your head. This is the difference between plugging wires connected to your head into a wall socket and sitting in the sun. Two totally different things. Granted the summary was shite so Ill cut you a little alack
Because things just aren't working out?
If you're informed that you're getting placebo then it's not placebo anymore. It is literally impossible to have informed consent in a placebo controlled trial.
And even if you phrase it like, "you MIGHT get a placebo" that still doesn't cover you.
It must come as quite a shock that there are rather strict ethical guidelines when it comes to experimenting on humans, born mostly out of a very ugly history of malpractice.
http://www.pcrm.org/research/h...
Using humans as lab rats is simply not an option.
=Smidge=
See the novobiotronics.com website. Professor Holland has investigated Electric Fields disrupting mitosis in cancer for the last ten years. Check out this TED lecture on using electric fields for cancer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w0_kazbb_U
So they can cause sparks to fly in metal across a gap, but magically become tamer when they know they're in a liquid.
Got it.
Wow, these EM near-fields are far more clever than the EM far-fields! Who knew!?
I worked for that company. One thing to keep in my folks is quality of life. With the system you may or may not be on chemo as well, so which would you rather: carry around a battery pack or bucket?
Also in case anybody was wondering the primary method of treatment for this system is cell apoptosis - the frequency is optimized to effect cancerous cells and not the rest.
When they're trying to calm us down its always "the fields do nothing, shut up, you're fine. They're non ionizing".
They are just trying to find ways to keep billing you for medical care for as long as possible, not improve your quality of life. Just euthanize me please when I get cancer!
That's not the issue. Active comparitors are standard and make sense: you don't really care anymore whether something works, you care whether it works better than what's available.
The issue here is that they decided not to give the patients who were on only chemo a fake head zapper to carry around for "ethical reasons." In a field where you have a serious conversation about whether you should do sham open chest surgery or not, it's suspicious that they considered carrying around a shoulder bag to be ethically unjustifiable.
In a conductive liquid, you'd be more likely to get current, right?
Ezekiel 23:20
It's like Iron Man except without the cool robot suits.
Wrong. Even when patients are informed that they are receiving a placebo, it has an effect. Want proof?
Dr. Ted J. Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has been studying placebos for more than 20 years. His most recent work on these “open-label placebos,” as they’re called, is fascinating. I had a chance to interview him in person earlier this year.
In one study, Kaptchuk looked at people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a common condition that causes abdominal cramping and diarrhea or constipation that can be debilitating for many. Half of the study volunteers were told they were getting an “open-label” placebo and the others got nothing at all. He found that there was a dramatic and significant improvement in the placebo group’s IBS symptoms, even though they were explicitly told they were getting a “sugar pill” without any active medication.
Also, nice way to be intentionally silly - you don't tell them that they are receiving a placebo - you inform them that they will receive either the placebo or the treatment being tested. You don't have to tell them which. Just that the distribution will be at random.
Placebos are often considered “fake” treatments. You may have heard them described as “sugar pills.” They usually take the form of pills, injections, or even entire procedures that are used in clinical trials to test “real” treatments. For example, one group of study participants is given an active drug and another group is given a placebo, which looks exactly like the active medication but is completely inactive. The participants can’t tell whether they’re getting the fake drug or the real drug. The researchers wait to see if the people taking the real one do better (or worse) than those taking the fake one.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Hmm... what's the difference between Irritable bowel syndrome and brain cancer? Can you think of any? Something that might make it acceptable to give one a placebo and not the other?
=Smidge=
Doesn't change the protocols. That's why it's called science.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yes it does, that's why it's called ethics.
As in, it's unethical to take a course of action that you know will result in permanent harm to the patient.
Not treating IBS can potentially result in non-life-threatening discomfort. With patient consent that's an ethically acceptable risk.
Not treating brain cancer can potentially result in mental disability and death. It is not ethically acceptable to provide no treatment when you KNOW that no treatment will result in an unacceptable outcome. So you provide the standard treatment and compare the experimental treatment to that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
=Smidge=
Seeing as 90% of all medical research is flawed, (and no, this is not some crank - it's pretty much accepted in research because of the evidence, as well as researchers personal knowledge/experience of bad studies we need to test against placebos, because some of the supposedly beneficial treatments are later found to be harmful.
Remember thalidomide? Or more recently, the panic over hormone replacement therapy because the biggest, best trial of HRT ever was started prematurely because it purported to show harmful effects of estrogen? 10s of millions of women world-wide were suddenly put on antidepressants to help deal with menopause side-effects. Turns out that the study was bogus, but more than a decade later, many doctors still haven't got the memo.
The flaw in the study was in using only estrogen from pregnant mare urine (Premarin and Prempro). Equine estrogen is not bio-identical to human estrogen (estradiol estrogen is), but it also contains equine enzymes that the human body has never seen in nature and can't handle - which cause, among other things, liver failure. Having horse enzymes in your blood, your organs, your brain ... that's going to cause problems. Also, progestins were included in HRT even though not needed, further increasing the risk. So this "definitive" study was harmful to people.
Heart attack is the #1 killer of women (no, not breast cancer). Estrogen helps protect against cardiovascular diseases. So people on a placebo would have been healthier, with less chance of sudden death.
Studies also show it's a potent anti-depressive, and delays the onset of Alzheimers and other dementias. Those are sentences of a slow death. It also reduces or stops suicidal ideation.
It also slows down bone demineralization by enabling the digestive system to take up more calcium (which is why calcium supplementation by itself doesn't work - if your body can't absorb it, you'll just eliminate it). 28% of women and 37% of men who fracture their hip die within one year. Considering that 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men will get at least 1 hip fracture, that's a significant amount of women who are now at higher risk because of this "greatest study ever."
So even the best studies need to be re-done, because if this study had included a placebo as well as Premarin, and also included other sources of estrogen such as estradiol, Premarin would have been singled out as the biggest contribution to health risk from HRT.
So placebos have a place - they would have saved millions of women from premature death, not endangered them further. That's why we do studies, and why we include placebos. Plus, placebos also work even when the patient is told that it's just a sugar pill. That's why you compare the benefits of a course of treatment with a placebo as well as no treatment. Why prescribe a drug with bad side effects when a placebo performs either as well or better? Not including placebos places people depending on the results of the study to make informed decisions at risk of making bad decisions. Some of those are fatal.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Nothing you just wrote about would be resolved if we were to let patients die from lack of treatment. Hell, none of what you wrote about is even comparable, for exactly the reasons I've already explained.
I really don't understand why you're having this difficulty: If giving no treatment carries a known high risk of harm to the patient, then no treatment is not an ethical option.
I'm not dismissing the efficacy and usefulness of placebo-controlled trials. I'm saying it's unethical to not treat patients with fatal illnesses if a proven treatment exists.
=Smidge=
Also, since this is a test, you don't know if the placebo is less dangerous than the treatment being tested - or you wouldn't need to run the test. Your arguments are not based in law, nor are they in agreement with the physician's code of ethics, which works by informed consent in such cases.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
our arguments are not based in law, nor are they in agreement with the physician's code of ethics, which works by informed consent in such cases.
I've already posted a couple of links explaining the history, the law, and the prevailing practice of ethics in medical research... which you very obviously have not bothered to read if you're making comments like that.
=Smidge=
Your arguments are bullshit when it comes to experimental treatments. People can give consent after being informed that the treatment may make their disease or condition worse, or even kill them.
The same applies to people in drug trials. In blind tests, you cannot tell people whether they will receive the test treatment or not, and if you haven't noticed, All consent forms for treatment, even in hospitals, contain the stipulation that the patient has been informed of any risks (and "any risks" includes death) before consent can be given.
It is universally recognized that ANY and ALL treatments carry a risk, that every medication has side effects, and that it is the right of the patient, unless they are unable to give or withhold consent, to make an informed decision.
You might want to look at things like advanced medical directives, where you can give consent to procedures that will, for example, reduce pain even though they will hasten your death. Get with the times.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.