The Benefits of Cryoablation Therapy

From Charles Moore’s article in Breast Cancer News:

“Compared with other techniques, one of the benefits of cryotherapy includes minimal pain, minimal scarring, lower cost, and faster recovery times. The Karmanos Cancer Center, which is  affiliated with Wayne State University’s School of Medicine, explains that once diseased cells are destroyed, components of the immune system clear out the dead tissue, and that patients  undergoing cryosurgery usually experience minor to moderate localized pain and redness, which can be alleviated by over-the-counter painkillers such as Tylenol or ibuprofen, and application of topical steroid creams.”

“Now a cryotherapy activist and advocate, Laura Ross-Paul says that while to date there have been several dozen patients treated by cryoablation for breast tumors by Dr. Peter Littrup, a pioneer in the cryotherapy field, the Chinese, who began using cryoablation to treat breast cancer about the same time as Littrup, have treated more than 4,000 women using the method as of the Summer of 2016.”

“The fact that these tremendous advances in China have not been duplicated in the U.S. is disturbing,” Ross-Paul said. “As activists promoting cryoablation in America, my husband and I have tried to identify why the progress in America is so slow, and then conceive of a solution to this problem. We believe we have the answer.”

Ross-Paul contends that:

“In America, cryoablation is seen as a treatment that needs to be proven effective before it is considered a safe alternative to the mastectomy and lumpectomy. FDA trials have been undertaken in the last 13 years, but the size of the trials has been limited due to financial constraints. As a result, when a doctor advises their patient who has breast cancer, cryoablation is considered as an unproven, experimental alternative to the much safer and statistically proven surgery.”

“Without statistical proof through trials,” she said, “cryoablation won’t be used. But if cryoablation isn’t used, there will be no statistics. This has doomed cryoablation in the U.S. to forever be an experimental treatment. To get around this dilemma, we believe that prevention is the key. Through early detection, women are finding something suspicious in a mammogram. Since it is not yet identified as cancer, they are told to wait and see if it develops. If it doesn’t, after a long time of fearful waiting, there is a joyful sigh of relief. If it is cancer, however, at that point, cryoablation is not considered and only surgery is advised.”

Laura Ross-Paul and I have been upset by this, so we came up with a new approach to this problem. We call it the “Early Freeze Protocol.”