Affordable Health Care: Maintain Good Health On A Budget

Everyone in the world should have access to good and affordable health care but the sad truth of the matter is that the majority of people do not. There are many countries in the world that fail to provide adequate affordable health care for the individuals that are unfortunate enough to live there. Political issues and dictatorships often prevent certain individuals from getting the health care that they so desperately need. We in the developed world are lucky enough to have affordable health care available on our doorstep and thus everyone can make sure that their health is well maintained and taken care of without question, political debate and removal of civil liberties and rights However, it may sometimes prove difficult to find affordable health care considering that medical professional train for several long hard years before qualifying and can in fact charge extortionate prices as compensation.

The best practices and doctors out there do not tend to offer affordable health care because their reputations usually attract more affluent clientele. Some are involved in research and actively look for the best possible solutions to health care problems. As a result, very few offer the affordable health care that people of the middle and lower classes need. After all, everyone has a right to decent affordable health care with doctors who are responsible and conscientious enough to offer it.

Affordable Health Care For All

Many people in the United States of America do in fact have affordable health care as a result of the decisions taken by many health care practices to have q few staff doctors, nurses and health care assistants on hand so more people can get an appointment as and when needed, thus lowering the prices and enabling ongoing health care as well. Although the physicians and doctors that own the practice are always on hand to provide advice, this means that an individual can pay less and still receive the best health care possible.

There have been necessary steps by the government and other bodies to try and lower the costs of health care over the last few years because not enough people had access to affordable health care and this was damaging the nation's health care as a whole. There are new facilities and treatment centres that anybody can access, better after care and better medication available to anyone now, thus making affordable health care a reality rather than a fantasy that most people cannot tap into or access.

Experimental cancer treatment

Experimental cancer treatments are medical therapies intended or claimed to treat cancer (see also tumor) by improving on, supplementing or replacing conventional methods (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and immunotherapy).

The entries listed below vary between theoretical therapies to unproven controversial therapies. Many of these treatments are alleged to only help against specific forms of cancer. It is not a list of treatments widely available at hospitals. 

Bacterial treatments 

Chemotherapeutic drugs have a hard time penetrating tumors to kill them at their core because these cells may lack a good blood supply. Researchers have been using anaerobic bacteria, such as Clostridium novyi, to consume the interior of oxygen-poor tumours. These should then die when they come in contact with the tumour's oxygenated sides, meaning they would be harmless to the rest of the body. A major problem has been that bacteria don't consume all parts of the malignant tissue. However combining the therapy with chemotheraputic treatments can help to solve this problem. 

Another strategy is to use anaerobic bacteria that have been transformed with an enzyme that can convert a non-toxic prodrug into a toxic drug. With the proliferation of the bacteria in the necrotic and hypoxic areas of the tumour the enzyme is expressed solely in the tumour. Thus a systemically applied prodrug is metabolised to the toxic drug only in the tumour. This has been demonstrated to be effective with the non pathogenic anaerobe Clostridium sporogenes.

Telomerase therapy 

Because most malignant cells rely on the activity of the protein telomerase for their immortality, it has been proposed that a drug which inactivates telomerase might be effective against a broad spectrum of malignancies. At the same time, most healthy tissues in the body express little if any telomerase, and would function normally in its absence.

A number of research groups have experimented with the use of telomerase inhibitors in animal models, and as of 2005 and 2006 phase I and II human clinical trials are underway. Geron Corporation, is currently conducting two clinical trials involving telomerase inhibitors. One uses a vaccine (GRNVAC1) and the other uses a lipidated drug (GRN163L). 

Thermotherapy 

Further information: Photothermal Therapy

Localized application of heat has been proposed as a technique for the treatment of malignant tumours. Intense heating will cause denaturation and coagulation of cellular proteins, rapidly killing cells within a tumour.

More prolonged moderate heating to temperatures just a few degrees above normal can cause more subtle changes. A mild heat treatment combined with other stresses can cause cell death by apoptosis. There are many biochemical consequences to the heat shock response within in cell, including slowed cell division and increased sensitivity to ionizing radiation therapy. 

There are many techniques by which heat may be delivered. Some of the most common involve the use of focused ultrasound (FUS or HIFU), microwave heating, induction heating, or direct application of heat through the use of heated saline pumped through catheters. Experiments have been done with carbon nanotubes that selectively bind to cancer cells. Lasers are then used that pass harmlessly through the body, but heat the nanotubes, causing the death of the cancer cells. Similar results have also been achieved with other types of nanoparticles including gold-coated nanoshells and nanorods which exhibit certain degrees of 'tunability' of the absorption properties of the nanoparticles to the wavelength of light for irradiation. The success of this approach to cancer treatment rests on the existence of an 'optical window' in which biological tissue (i.e,. healthy cells) are completely transparent at the wavelength of the laser light while nanoparticles are highly absorbing at the same wavelength. Such a 'window' exists in the so-called near infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. In this way, the laser light can pass through the system without harming healthy tissue and only diseased cells, where the nanoparticles reside, get hot and are killed.

One of the challenges in thermal therapy is delivering the appropriate amount of heat to the correct part of the patient's body. A great deal of current research focuses on precisely positioning heat delivery devices (catheters, microwave and ultrasound applicators, etc.) using ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging, as well as of developing new types of nanoparticles that make them particularly efficient absorbers while offering little or no concerns about toxicity to the circulation system. Clinicians also hope to use advanced imaging techniques to monitor heat treatments in real time—heat-induced changes in tissue are sometimes perceptible using these imaging instruments.