INTERSTITIAL BRACHYTHERAPY (IMPLANTING RADIOACTIVE SEEDS) FOR PROSTATE CANCER
This is basically hand-to-hand combat, instead of missiles launched from far away. The idea here is that the farther away energy gets from its source—the more tissue a radiation beam has to pass through to reach its target—the less effective it will be in killing cancer. And that implanting tiny sources of radiation directly in the cancerous tissue (brachy comes from the Greek word meaning “short,” as in “a short distance away from the malignancy”) will really blast the tumor—and, as an added bonus, minimize the risk of harming innocent civilians, the cancer-free cells nearby.
The concept is not new. Pierre Curie thought of it nearly a century ago— even before external-beam radiation treatment came on the scene—and doctors in New York tried it several years later; they inserted thin glass tubes with a radioactive substance called radon directly into tumors. The treatment killed tissue, all right, but the results were uneven; some of the targeted tissue was devastated while other tissue remained unscathed. In the next decades, scientists improved the technique, but its popularity waned as hormonal treatment developed and as external-beam radiation therapy got better (see above). In the 1950s and 1960s, however, improvements in dosages and radioactive materials helped foster a comeback for interstitial therapy: Doctors implanted radioactive gold “seeds,” or tiny chunks of radioactive material, in men with prostate cancer; this was combined with external-beam radiation therapy. A few years later, doctors began using radioactive iodine seeds to fight prostate cancer.
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