Doctors: Early Detection is Best Bet to Battle Cancer

by Jeff Hardison | Lake City Reporter | 06.06.2009

Early detection of cancer always leads to improved results, said Dr. Mark Thompson of North Florida Cancer Center of Lake City and Florida Radiation Oncology Group.

Today is “National Cancer Survivors Day,” and two local doctors answered questions about preventing and treating the disease.

“I have a great deal of respect for prevention and early detection of cancer,” Thompson said. “I also have a great deal of respect for genealogy.”

Genetics are significant in regard to cancer, he said. If a parent or both parents have colon, prostate, breast or lung cancer, then that person should pay even more attention to screening for signs of these types of cancer, he said.

Thompson was at Case Western University for 23 years as an oncologist and he has been in Lake City for two years, he said.

He much prefers telling a woman that the small lump in her breast is a tumor that she found in time, in contrast with telling a patient that she waited too long to bring an issue to the attention of her doctor.

If symptoms appear, see a doctor, he said.

“Symptoms are anything that is not normal for you,” he said.

“With the economics of today,” he said, “some people are less apt to get a test or to see their physician. They hope that by ignoring it, it will go away.”

Ignoring symptoms is not a method to use, Thompson said.

In addition to having regular checkups, Thompson recommends practicing healthy living. Do not smoke, he said. Do not eat a high-fat diet. Use sunscreen.

“It’s very important to use sunscreen,” he said.

There is new technology available here for detecting cancer very early, he said.

At North Florida Cancer Center of Lake City, he said, people can be examined with Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Cathode Tube (CT) scans now.

Patients are injected with a radioactive sugar solution, Thompson said, and it goes to where the body is rapidly using glucose to make cells, which is indicative of cancer cells being produced.

The patient’s body is scanned from head to toe. This shows the doctor where cancer may exist.

“Years ago,” he said, “we had to wait until there was a lump. Now we can look at a normal size cell and see it has abnormal physiology, which indicates cancer.”

Thompson said the study of cancer is going into a new era.

“The whole emphasis on oncology now is to look at and find the genes responsible for cancer and to repair it before it becomes cancerous,” he said.

Cancer doctors are also looking at targeted therapies to which patients are responding. A combination of chemotherapy, radiation treatments and surgical removal of tissue is used.

“Radiation therapy is much more sophisticated now,” Thompson said. “It targets the tumor and does not damage the surrounding tissue.”

Dr. Paul Schilling of Community Cancer Center of Lake City has been an oncologist for 16 years, practicing only in North Florida.

He agreed that there have been changes in cancer treatment methods over the years.

“Having cancer these days is certainly not a death sentence,” Schilling said. “Many patients are cured.”

He attributed the increase in survival rates to more awareness and people seeking better cancer screening tests.

“There’s really more awareness by the patients, by the public and more awareness by physicians,” Schilling said. “In the past 10-15 years, we’ve had much more effective screening for the most common cancers.”

He said breast cancer, prostate cancer and colon cancer all have very good screening tests, that if used, people will be able to detect cancer early at a curable stage.

Schilling said the change in cancer awareness came about in the 1970s and 1980s.

“We noticed the cancer rates were going up and we demanded better screening tools,” he said.

During those years mammograms, colonoscopies and tests were developed to screen for prostate cancer.

Community Cancer Center of Lake City was the first place to have a PET/CT scan machine in Lake City, he said.

Community Cancer Center also has brachytherapy, which puts a radioactive seed in a tumor to treat it from inside out, Schilling said.

The Community Cancer Center of Lake City also utilizes B-mode Acquisition and Targeting ultrasound. The use of the device allows doctors to target the prostate so that it can be treated during radiation treatment.

“It’s also reduced the side-effects for men who are getting prostate cancer treatment,” Schilling said.

The facility utilizes PET/CT technology to precisely diagnose tumor spread.

“One of the major advances we’ve made within radiation treatment is both, being able to better define where cancer is and also to better target where we want the radiation dose to go,” Schilling said. “We have several new tools within the past five years. The patients respond quite well to that because they have radiation exposure to a smaller area.”

Schilling also noted a special kind of radiation treatment called electrons for skin cancer patients, which allows the doctors to just treat the surface of the skin, with no surgery and scarring.

Reporter Tony Britt contributed to this story.

Copyright Lake City Reporter 2009