Blog
09/28/2019
Protons 101: Proton Therapy is Superior to IMRT for Head and Neck Cancer Treatment
Recent presentation intro slide – August 2019 – thanks to Dr. Frank for his tremendous leadership in pushing to move our field forward. First things first. I need to give credit to Dr. Frank for the title – It is a great, honest, straightforward statement on where we believe…
Read more08/24/2019
Protons 101: Prostate Cancer: Summary of Current Data
DISCLAIMER / About the Blog – Please read once if you haven’t. And please note – today, I just talk about traditional fractionation schedules or modestly hypofractionated data. Today, I’m refreshing a post from may of 2019 where I reviewed prostate cancer radiation outcome data. That…
Read more08/13/2019
Protons 101: Comparative Effectiveness of Proton Chemoradiotherapy to Photon Chemoradiotherapy
DISCLAIMER / About the Blog – Please read once if you haven’t. Below is a more technical post on what I think is one of the most powerful studies to come out this year. This study was presented at ASCO this summer and showed that by…
Read more08/05/2019
Protons 101: An Example of a CNS Tumor Proton Therapy Plan
Today we’ll look at a place where there actually are not large studies showing significant benefits to proton therapy. So if you don’t think protons are better, you could easily use this disease site to state that there is very little evidence of improvement in outcomes with the use of…
Read more08/01/2019
Real Men Wear Pink Campaign
Today, I’m announcing my “Real Men Wear Pink Campaign” to help raise money to fight breast cancer. OFFICIAL LINK TO MY AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY PAGE. The campaign will run from August – October as we hold events to raise money and awareness regarding breast cancer and the risk and…
Read more07/26/2019
Protons 101: An example of a breast cancer proton therapy plan
Today, we’ll walk through images from a breast cancer proton plan. From a technical standpoint, Its a unique case for a number of reasons but it does showcase some places and ways in which proton plans greatly outperform what we can accomplish using a traditional linear accelerator with either photons…
Read more07/18/2019
Protons 101: Prostate Cancer - Too many choices, not enough direction.
Note: Today is an opinion piece on options for prostate cancer. It is MUCH more opinion based than some other entries on the blog – just a note. I still think the topic is valuable and writing these helps me to organize my thinking. Today, we’ll look at options…
Read more07/08/2019
Protons 101: What is radiation therapy?
DISCLAIMER / About the Blog – Please read once if you haven’t. The Three Primary Treatment Options for Cancer Patients The 3 main oncology (cancer) physician specialties are: Surgical Oncology: removes the cancer or the majority of it with an operation Radiation…
Read more06/25/2019
Protons 101: Is Proton Therapy the best radiation option for me?
DISCLAIMER / About the Blog – Please read once if you haven’t. Today we will touch on really one the first questions that a cancer patient might have – are protons right for me? Notice that in that statement I use the phrase “we will touch”…
Read more06/05/2019
Protons 101: Proton Therapy cuts severe side effects for patients by well over 50% - New study results
BRIAN BAUMANN/MIKE WORFULA new study led by Brian Baumann, MD, of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found that proton therapy (bottom) is associated with fewer severe side effects than conventional X-ray radiation therapy (top) for many cancer patients. Protons are relatively heavy, positively charged particles that…
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