THE CANCER KNIFE

Cancer is really at an all time high I think. In recent times, almost one in ten people I have come across, has got cancer, or a family member who has been diagnosed of the deadly disease. Just a couple days ago, a client relived a very sad incidence of how she was planning for her second child, and she just went to her GP, to ensure all was well and to do the preliminary checks, and in 24 hours, her phone was buzzing with distress calls from the surgery, only to be told to come back to the surgery ASAP, and trust me, when your surgery gives you such calls, its hardly ever positive feedback and in this lady's incidence, that was how she began her battle with cancer. Very sad indeed. I have said in a couple posts, that all we can do is make plans, but the outcome, is entirely out of our control. And if you are like myself, that has strong faith in the power of God, your perception and attitude to life, is changed by the realities of life.

However, thank God for doctors and the researchers among them who keep on looking for ways to make life better, and when I watched this documentary on the new surgical knife that detects cancer, I was overly impressed and her to share the write up written by Maria Cheng;

LONDON (AP) — Surgeons may have a new way to smoke out cancer.

An experimental surgical knife can help surgeons make sure they've removed all the cancerous tissue, doctors reported Wednesday. Surgeons typically use knives that heat tissue as they cut, producing a sharp-smelling smoke. The new knife analyzes the smoke and can instantly signal whether the tissue is cancerous or healthy.

Now surgeons have to send the tissue to a lab and wait for the results.

Dr. Zoltan Takats of Imperial College London suspected the smoke produced during cancer surgery might contain some important cancer clues. So he designed a ‘‘smart’’ knife hooked up to a refrigerator-sized mass spectrometry device on wheels that analyzes the smoke from cauterizing tissue.

The smoke picked up by the smart knife is compared to a library of smoke ‘‘signatures’’ from cancerous and non-cancerous tissues. Information appears on a monitor: green means the tissue is healthy, red means cancerous and yellow means unidentifiable.

To make sure they've removed the tumor, surgeons now send samples to a laboratory while the patient remains on the operating table. It can take about 30 minutes to get an answer in the best hospitals, but even then doctors cannot be entirely sure, so they often remove a bit more tissue than they think is strictly necessary.

If some cancerous cells remain, patients may need to have another surgery or undergo chemotherapy or radiation treatment.

‘‘(The new knife) looks fabulous,’’ said Dr. Emma King, a head and neck cancer surgeon at Cancer Research U.K., who was not connected to the project. The smoke contains broken-up bits of tumor tissue and ‘‘it makes sense to look at it more carefully,’’ she said.

The new knife and its accompanying machines were made for about £250,000 ($380,000) but scientists said the price tag would likely drop if the technology is commercialized.

(www.imperial.ac.uk)