HealthCare

Mind-body techniques may not cure cancer, but they make living with it a whole lot easier Mary Peterson stands in a conference room at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston with her arms stretched above her head. As her instructor intones directions, she visualizes energy pouring into her liver, leans against a wall, then lets out a resounding exhalation. Peterson, who has metastatic breast cancer, receives regular chemotherapy. She and three other women are also taking part in another form of cancer treatment called qigong, an ancient Chinese movement and meditation technique....

IMPROVED RADIATION TECHNOLOGY TARGETS CANCER CELLS MORE PRECISELY Radiation therapy is often used to treat cancer. Radiation works by using packets of energy to destroy the cancer - often by damaging the genetic material of the cancer cell itself, to make it impossible to grow. Over the past decades radiation was established as a highly effective, generally targeted, form of cancer treatment. The higher the radiation dose that could be delivered, the better the size and growth of the tumor could be controlled. Unfortunately, the radiation doses tolerated by a person is very low....

The Miracle Hunter How Elizabeth Corsi turned a drug nobody wanted into a company that could soon gross $500 million--and prolong the lives of cancer patients. For Ernest Lynton, the diagnosis was a death sentence. He had cancer of the pancreas, a disease so lethal that he would be lucky to live six months. Surgery had failed--the tumor was too large--and the usual cocktail of chemotherapy drugs didn't hold much promise. He might very well have written a will and waited to die. But Lynton was a scientist by training, a retired physicist, and he was intrigued by the notion of using his cancer to advance knowledge.

Helping cancer patients look good and feel better Just because a woman is undergoing treatment for cancer doesn't mean she has to look like it. Advances in pain, fatigue and anti-nausea medications lesson the side effects of chemotherapy and help a person feel better faster. However, chemotherapy also has side effects that show externally. Hair loss, dry, pale skin and brittle finger nails are all common consequences of chemotherapy. People lose hair because the chemicals used to combat cancer cells also weaken hair follicles

Molecular Revolution A new generation of drugs takes aim at the very heart of cancer--the abnormal genes that make cells malignant in the first place Last week's miracle-in-mice may have launched a thousand premature hopes, but there's no doubt in the minds of cancer researchers today that a new era is dawning in the treatment of the U.S.'s No. 2 killer. Three decades ago, the Federal Government's "War on Cancer" underwrote basic discoveries about the ways broken-down genes lead to malignancies. Now that work is beginning to pay off.