Liver cancer - 1272848

Hi slane,

I'm very sorry your mom is dealing with liver cancer. We don't have specific info about radiating the liver though there is a bit of info on the subject that states "lung and other common cancers" of which liver would certainly be one.
Dr. West had this to say, "Jim raised the right points here. Proton beam radiation is unquestionably more expensive, but it’s not clearly better than conventional and still quite advanced radiation techniques like IMRT (intensity modulated radiation therapy) for lung cancer and most other common cancers. The challenge is that it is marketed very aggressively because the centers cost so much that the people need to recoup their $200M investments, which you can’t do if you limit yourself to the few clinical situations in which proton beam RT is actually a clearly superior choice. So you market the hell out of it, provide vague innuendos that newer and more expensive is better, and take advantage of the fact that people are inclined to believe that more expensive must be superior. You can certainly use some dizzying physics theories to provide a plausible smokescreen in the absence of actual evidence it’s better.
It’s possible that additional studies will ultimately demonstrate that proton beam radiation is superior for lung cancer and other common cancers, but not necessarily. A study in prostate cancer showed it was clearly NOT more effective and was associated with worse side effects than more readily available IMRT, perhaps because the more sophisticated software for more mature radiation platforms allows better tailoring of the radiation field than most current proton centers, which have more rudimentary software to guide the process.
This isn’t sour grapes, by the way. Our own center was approached as the first choice place for a proton beam facility by a private group wanting to build in Seattle,...cont'd

continued from previous post..."wanting to build in Seattle, but our radiation oncologists saw that the cost couldn’t be justified by the limited group of patients best served by protons. They concluded you would need to market it to people beyond its demonstrated place, and that’s exactly what’s happening." http://cancergrace.org/topic/radiation-vs-proton-radiation

Interestingly enough just today there's a new video posted about trials including testing if proton therapy is less harmful than others. I've not viewed it yet but read a bit of transcript, http://cancergrace.org/lung/tag/proton-beam-radiation-therapy/

I hope this helps a bit. Best of luck to your mom.
Janine