Superb!! Proton therapy for all cancer patients in this Chennai hospital - How will patients be benefited?
For so many years, radiation therapy using X-rays was used to treat cancer patients successfully. With the advancement in the medical field, now proton therapy is being used to treat cancer etc. Energy from positively charged particles or protons is used here. It is really superb to note that proton therapy has increased the survival rates of some cancers.
There is always a huge concern that the high energy machines that are used in radiation oncology have been contributing to increase in the levels of carbon dioxide levels. It is worthy to note that the increase in the levels of carbon dioxide would affect human health plus it would lead to climate change etc.
In this scenario, Apollo Proton Cancer Centre in Chennai has been trying for democratisation of proton therapy. This was mentioned by Dr. Rakesh Jalali, neuro-oncologist. The use of high powered energy to treat cancer and other non-cancerous tumours is proton therapy.
The main disadvantage of proton therapy is its huge infrastructural cost. This would make many cancer patients not to opt for proton therapy as it would be expensive.
Dr. Rakesh hinted that Apollo Proton Cancer Centre would develop a cost effective and efficient method to ensure that the proton therapy would be available to all the patients. He added that efforts were taken to make proton therapy less polluting also. He spoke about proton therapy and its benefits at the 3 day annual proton practicum. More than 700 participants like radiation oncologists and medical physicists etc took part in this from around the world.
