NEW medical development/procedures out at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota are providing a new, less risky way of treating malignant melanoma. Malignant melanoma is the DEADLIEST form of skin cancer, but if you can catch it BEFORE it spreads, it CAN be curable!! A risk factor that comes with "traditional chemotherapy" is the effect that it can have on the rest of your body. Now, physicians at Mayo are using a new surgical technique to deliver high does of chemo ONLY to those area that need it. For example: if the malignant melanoma is in your leg, doctors will tourniquet the leg & hook the artery & vein up to a bypass machine, similar to the ones they use in open-heart surgery. Once the machine is moving the blood through the leg, they shoot high does of chemo. These doses are 6 to 10 times higher than what would be safe or appropriate to give to the person's entire body. I have a feeling that the medical advances we'll all be seeing in the next 10 to 15 years will be far greater than in the previous 100 years. There is, indeed, a lot of light at the end of the tunnel. The Mayo Clinic Health Minute is heard weekday evenings at 5:30 on our 5 o'clock News Hour on KSEN/K 96 Radio.

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