I wanted to talk today about a great program that are friends over at Bethesda Skincare are offering right now. There doing something to support people with cancer that I think is a great idea. It shows just how much they care and I believe is a win win for everyone involved.
Bethesda Skincare is a great company that makes a whole lot of great skin care products that are designed to use naturally occurring elements. They believe in taking things found in nature known for their healing and restorative properties, and creating products that soothe, strengthen moisturize and energize the skin.
They realize that people undergoing cancer treatment go through a whole lot of procedures that can be damaging to the skin. For this reason they feel that they are an excellent group to target with their products. They are a company, so of course their out to make some money, but I believe they have good intentions with this. They also try and incorporate more preventive measures to protect the skin into their products.
So what their doing right now is that if you send them an e-mail at store@bethesdaskincare.com, they will send a free bar of Bethesda sunscreen soap to anyone who is suffering from any type of cancer or knows someone suffering from cancer. The way they explain it there, it basically covers everyone. I think you’d be hard pressed in this day and age to find anyone that didn’t at least know someone who suffered from some type of cancer.
All you have to do is send them the person’s name, addressee, and condition to that e-mail and the soap will be on the way. Make sure to reference “The Melanie Policy”.
Their calling it the Melanie Policy in order to honor the sister of founder Jaime Collins Doss. Her sister, Melanie, suffered from both colon and liver cancer and fought bravely against the disease. I know that she would be honored to know that her name lives on with this program.
The sunscreen soap that they offer here is a tremendous product that uses a combination of healing and therapeutic properties to strengthen and restore the skin. Its not a sunscreen substitute, but rather a soap to use everyday that incorporates certain elements to strengthen the skin’s ability to resist the damage of sun exposure.
While your getting your free bar of soap for the person you know, make sure to check out their website and see the vast array of other products they have to offer.
I have no affiliation with this store, in fact they don’t even know I’m promoting it. I just think its a great idea and a great opportunity that I thought I’d share with everyone on here.
Some good news for wine lovers out there, a study released this summer that shows that wine may help alleviate some of the side effects of radiation therapy. The study, done by an Italian medical university, claims that a glass of red wine before undergoing treatment helps them better tolerate the treatment and reduces the adverse effects.
The study was conducted on 348 women treated for breast cancer between 2003 and 2007 at the radiotherapy and palliative care unit of the Catholic University of Campobasso. The results of the study concluded that patients who consumed red wine daily in moderation experienced a 75% reduction of the skin lesions associated with radiation treatment compared to those who did not consume the wine.
“Our data are to be taken with caution as our study was an observational one,” said Alessio Morganti, director of the radiotherapy unit.
“A formal randomized trial should now be performed. Establishing the role of wine and its non-alcoholic components is certainly a crucial issue that may open a new way for the preventive use of antioxidants,” he said.
While this study in particular used breast cancer patients, radiation is a common treatment option in many different types of cancers. This includes the vast majority of skin cancer cases, although not with melanoma. Melanoma is classified as part of the group of radio resistant cancers, as the dose required to produce an effect is considered not safe for clinical practice.
This is good news as far as I’m concerned because any natural way to reduce those horrible side effects is good in my book. I also fear as that people get a little overprotective of patients when their undergoing radiation treatment. A little red wine would be a nice break to take their mind off what their going through. The fact that it helps out is just more icing on the cake. A key word to remember though is moderation, we don’t need anybody going overboard
The full study is due to be published online in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology Biology Physics
Our medical industry in this country is constantly searching for new ways to combat diseases. Medicine and pharmaceuticals after all is big business and while a lot of this is motivated by money, its still nice when new advances are found in our attempt to stamp out disease. One of the biggest ones out there right now is cancer. There’s a lot of money to be made in fighting cancer, and thus there’s a lot of research being done for it.
Recently a new experimental drug designed by Roche Holding AG’s Genentech unit, has gone through an initial testing phase and produced some remarkable results. This drug attempts to attack the so called hedgehog pathway which is instrumental in the development of some cancers. An article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Roche Drug Shrinks Tumors” details what we have learned from this initial trial.
In a small study the drug, known for now as GDC-0449, was found to have shrunk tumors in 18 out of 33 patients suffering from basal cell carcinoma. That’s a 55% success rate which is remarkably high for an early stage cancer trial and has researchers very optimistic.
The drug also had a dramatic, though temporary, effect on a patient suffering from a form of brain cancer known as medulloblastoma.
“This defines a new pathway that may have efficacy for multiple tumor types,” said Charles M. Rudin, associate director for clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, and a co-author of two reports on the drug that are being published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
While still in its infancy, the results are certainly encouraging.
“The studies are preliminary, and we don’t know in the long term how useful this class of drugs will be,” said Andrzej A. Dlugosz, a researcher at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center, Ann Arbor, and co-author of an editorial that accompanied publication of the findings. Still, he said, “hopes are big” that the responses seen in the trial hold promise for “this being a new approach” to cancer treatment.
Basal cell carcinoma is the most common form of skin cancer and affects about 1 million Americans a year. Most cases are easily treatable with surgery, although it does spread in some cases and prognosis in those instances is poor. This type was chosen for the study because about 90% of basal cell carcinoma cases are driven by a mutation in the hedgehog pathway.
All in all this has to be seen as great news and it looks like the outlook for the drug is good. Based on these encouraging results, the company is hopeful that they will be able to push for FDA approval soon. What’s especially important about this drug is that it could be the start of a whole new direction in cancer drug development. No drug before has taken this particular route in attacking cancer. Successful research here can only spawn newer and better things for the future of cancer research.
When you think of protecting yourself from the sun its almost always in regards to protecting yourself from skin cancer and damage from the UV ray’s. That however is not the only time when you have to think about your exposure to the sun.
Today I wanted to talk about the reaction that certain medications have to the sun. We’ve all seen the take with food warnings, a not as common warning however is to stay out of the sun while on a medication.
Medications that carry this kind of warning are known as sun-sensitizing drugs. These drugs have side effects when people taking them are exposed to the sun. There are two main types of sun-sensitizing drug reactions, photoallergy and phototoxicity.
Photoallergic drugs are ones where problems occur when the skin is exposed to the sun after the medication has been applied to the skin’s surface. The UV ray exposure causes a structural change to occur in the drug. The body then responds by producing antibodies that lead to the sun-sensitivity reaction. This usually results in a rash which can occur up to a few days after exposure. From there the rash could possibly spread to other areas of the body that were not even exposed to the sun.
The other more common type is phototoxicity. This can occur with all types of medications no matter how they are taken. What occurs here is that the drug itself absorbs the UV light from the sun and then releases it into the skin resulting in cell death. Within a few days symptoms will start to appear. The crazy part here is that symptoms can persist up to 20 years after the medication is stopped.
It’s important to remember that not every person who takes one of these medications will experience a reaction. It could be a one time deal or it can each time the medication is taken and then sun exposure occurs.
Sunscreens can help a little bit with this, but the best option is when taking one of these to just go ahead and try and stay out of the sun. If its going to be a long term medication then your most likely going to have to get some protective clothing to limit your skin’s exposure to the UV rays.
If you see a label or warning on a medication your taking about sun exposure I would suggest contacting your doctor and discussing the situation. Always better to be safe than sorry.
Below is a list of some common sun sensitizing medications from WebMD:
- Antibiotics: Doxycycline, tetracycline, ciprofloxacin, ofloxacin, levofloxacin, trimethoprim
- Antidepressants: Sinequan (doxepin); and other tricyclics; St. John’s wort
- Antihistamine: promethazine, diphenhydramine
- Benzoyl peroxide
- Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories: ibuprofen, ketoprofen, naproxen, celecoxib, piroxicam
- Diuretics: Furosemide, burmetanide, hydrolorothiazide
- Antihypertensives ( blood pressure drugs): Aldactazide, Capoten, capazide, lotensin
- Antianxiety medications: Xanax, Librium, compazine
- Benzocaine
- Cholesterol medications: Zocor, Questran, Lescol, lovastatin
- Estradiol, progesterin (in oral contraceptives, HRT)
- Retinoids: Isotretinoin, acitretin
- Hypoglycemics: glipizide, glyburide
- PDT Pro photosensitizers: 5-aminolvulinin acid, methyl-5-aminolevulinici acid
- Neuroleptic drugs: Chlorpromazine, fluphenazine, perazine, perphenazine, thioridazine, chlorprothixene, thiothixene
- Antifungals: griseofulvin
- Sulfonamides: sulfadiazine, sulfamethizole, sulfamethoxazole, sulfasalazine, sulfisoxazole
- Other drugs: Para-aminobenzoic acid (PABA), 5-FU, amiodarone, diltiazem, quinidine, hydroxychloroquine, coal tar, enalapril, dapsone, cinnamates, benzophenones, salicylates.
This month Rhode Island Hospital dermatologist Martin Weinstock MD PhD received a $1 million 2 year Team Science grant from the Melanoma Research Alliance. Dr. Weinstock received this grant to serve as principal investigator in developing a training program for primary care physicians to improve melanoma screening in primary care. Your primary care doctor is always going to be the doctor you see most often and by improving their screening abilities, they can serve as a good first line of defense for patients.
The goal of the program is to eventually develop a web based training module that will lead to earlier detection of melanoma. Dr. Weinstock theorizes that this could ultimately result in cutting the number of melanoma deaths in half. By establishing a web based module for the training program, doctors all over the world will be able to benefit and learn from the experts.
Weinstock, who is also a professor of dermatology at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, says, “Conventional education programs have stabilized mortality rates, however, an increasing body of evidence indicates that effective early detection is our best hope for cutting melanoma deaths by at least half in the near future.” He continues, “We need to change our methods to get a substantial reduction in deaths.”
Melanoma is a serious problem in the United States, and all over the world. According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 68,720 new melanoma cases will be diagnosed in the United States this year. While melanoma accounts for only 5 percent of skin cancer cases, its high mortality rate accounts for almost 80 percent of skin cancer deaths.
He notes that knowledge and skills for melanoma screening remain low in the primary care area and performance of thorough skin self-examinations also remains low. The grant from the Melanoma Research Alliance will allow Weinstock and other researchers to develop a new training program that will target these issues. He says, “Through this grant, we are now able to develop an early detection training program that is web-based for widespread use and grounded in the realities of primary care delivery. We believe the program we are developing will allow a quantum leap in interactivity compared to prior efforts in melanoma screening.”
Early detection is the key when it comes to melanoma. If caught early enough the disease is very treatable. Since your primary doctor is going to be the first one you go to see, this is the area where the knowledge can be best put to use. That time between the patient seeing their primary doctor and going to see a specialist for diagnosis, is wasted time when the disease is making its deadly advance.
I think this is excellent news and a very effective strategic plan of attack. Are greatest weapon in the war against disease is knowledge. Our experts can be best served by taking what they’ve learned and passing it on to others. Its just not possible for every patient that needs it to go and visit one of the experts in the field. So by raising the knowledge and awareness of others in the medical profession, these experts are really put to their best use.
