Comparison With Other Treatment Options
The issue of when, whether, and how best to apply this technology is controversial. As of 2012 there have been no controlled trials to demonstrate that proton therapy yields improved survival, or other clinical outcomes (including impotence in prostate cancer) compared to other types of radiation therapy, although a 5-year study of prostate cancer is underway at Massachusetts General Hospital. Proton therapy is far more expensive than conventional therapy. Using current technology, proton therapy requires a very large capital investment (from $100M to more than $180M).
Preliminary results from a three-year 2009 study, including high dose treatments, show very few side effects.
Read more about this topic: Proton Therapy
Famous quotes containing the words comparison with, comparison and/or treatment:
“Clay answered the petition by declaring that while he looked on the institution of slavery as an evil, it was ‘nothing in comparison with the far greater evil which would inevitably flow from a sudden and indiscriminate emancipation.’”
—State of Indiana, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The difference between human vision and the image perceived by the faceted eye of an insect may be compared with the difference between a half-tone block made with the very finest screen and the corresponding picture as represented by the very coarse screening used in common newspaper pictorial reproduction. The same comparison holds good between the way Gogol saw things and the way average readers and average writers see things.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“To me, nothing can be more important than giving children books, It’s better to be giving books to children than drug treatment to them when they’re 15 years old. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn’t have to put them in prisons?”
—Fran Lebowitz (20th century)