Photodynamic red light therapy, a treatment for cancer, offers three primary benefits which include short recovery time, few side effects, and the ability to annihilate malignant cells without harming normal body cells. Another benefit is that red laser light can treat precancerous cells as well as severely diseased cancer tissue which has progressed to late stages of malignancy. These benefits ease the discomfort of treating throat cancer and cancer of the esophagus, making red light treatment preferable to radiation and chemotherapy. Singers and other professionals who rely on voice especially appreciate that red light therapy does not cause a risk of losing the use and quality of their voices.
The recovery time after red light therapy is less than a day. The operation lasts roughly three hours, is non-invasive, and allows the patient to leave the hospital immediately afterward. While radiation and chemotherapy may require repeated treatment over several months, leaving the patient weak and with a compromised immune system, red light therapy only has one negative side effect which lasts for shorter than 24 hours. Patients treated with red light become hypersensitive to the sun and burn easily. Wearing sunscreen will not prevent the burning, and most patients are advised to avoid direct sunlight for a day.
The benefits of red light therapy are a result of the laser light interacting with an injected drug, porfimer sodium, a liquid solution which responds to light and causes a chemical reaction that releases toxins which kill cancer tissue. The drug, which collects in cancerous tissue and turns them red, is injected into the patient’s body two to three days before red light therapy. The killing of cancer cells occurs the moment the red light strikes the pigmented cancer cells, igniting the release of a quality of oxygen that is poisonous to cancer cells only. The gentleness of the treatment means that a repeated surgery, if necessary for large tumors, can occur within two weeks.
Patients are sedated during red light therapy. In addition to laser, surgeons might use additional tools, such as scopes, which can enter the body and visually confirm the location of cancer cells to which the laser must be guided. One drawback of red light therapy is that it may only be able to treat tumors that have a diameter no larger than a quarter of an inch (0.64 cm). Red light cannot penetrate to great depths to treat larger tumors. It can only treat superficial tumors and tumors that can be accessed with scopes.
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irontoenail
Post 3 |
@pastanaga - The two are related, you're right. Red light therapy is a slightly less intense version of the intense pulsed light therapy you probably had for hair removal. It's used for quite a few things, not just for removing throat cancer. But I think it's still considered a bit controversial at the moment. While it's undeniable that it does work with some things, with others, like pain relief, it's not quite as clear cut. |
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browncoat
Post 2 |
I wonder if singers and performers are more likely to get throat cancer than the general population, or if it's just that they notice it more easily? I would have thought they'd be more careful of their throats than most people, like not smoking or doing anything that could damage it. On the other hand, I suppose it's more likely that someone in "show biz" will be hanging around people who smoke, or drinking a lot and so forth, so maybe they just give in to temptation. And for all I know it actually causes stress on the throat over time, if you have to sing at concerts and things. In fact, it almost certainly does, so perhaps they do have a slightly greater risk of this kind of cancer. |
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pastanaga
Post 1 |
It sounds like red light therapy is similar to laser hair removal techniques. I've had that done and it had the same sort of thing, where you had to avoid the sun afterward because your skin had increased sensitivity. It probably works the same way too. Even though I had it done for hair removal, it targeted my freckles as well, and removed them I imagine that it's because it focuses on pigment, like this therapy can only focus on the small, superficial tumors. If that's so, I can see why it would be considered a vast improvement over radiation or chemotherapy. It hardly affected me at all when I had the treatments done. Except in the wallet, of course. |
