Argumentative Essay: gene therapy Table of Contents Title Page 1 Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Why is Gene Therapy Better in Treating Cancer? 3 Conclusion 5 Works Cited 7 Introduction Today, when people get sick, they visit doctors and then they are given a prescription of what kind of medication to take or what kind of therapy they are supposed to under in order to get well and most of the time, patients do get well. There are times wherein patients do not get entirely cured by visiting doctors and undergoing every little thing that the doctors told them to do. The problem would such lies on the fact that there are medications (drugs) and therapies which are just not good enough to rid a person of a certain ailment. Throughout the years, medicine and its form of treatments have evolved from the use of herbal plant extracts to the use of scientifically formed synthetic drugs, radiotherapy and so on. All of these advancements are indeed very useful. There is one advancement however, that the writer believes is of the greatest potential to treat diseases not curable by other conventional forms of medical treatment, namely gene therapy.
To be more specific on the topic of discussion, this paper aims to show that gene therapy is the best therapy for the treatment of cancer. Why is Gene Therapy Better in Treating Cancer? The conventional forms of cancer treatment include surgery, radiation and chemotherapy (Cancer Treatment Centers of America, par. 11-14).
The Essay on Laetrile Is An Effective Treatment For Cancer
Laetrile Is An Effective Treatment For Cancer Many people in the world today suffer from various forms of cancer. Some types are carcinoma, leukemia, sarcoma, lymphoma, and melanoma. One out of three of us will develop cancer in our lifetime. That is eighty-eight million people in the United States alone. And according to the American Cancer Society, 1.3 million new cases of cancer were diagnosed ...
All of these conventional treatments are effective depending on the kind of cancer being considered. However, all of these forms of therapies serve to do a lot of damage to the patients throughout the course of treatment. Surgery, for example, is unavoidably invasive. Furthermore, the success rate of the procedure is highly dependent on the experience of the surgeon as well as the type of cancer being considered. It is a practice which has been done to treat cancer for decades, yet it is unavoidable that healthy tissues surrounding the cancer cells would also have to be removed just to make sure that no single cancer cell remains should cancer cells still exist within the body of the patient, there is a great chance that the cancer will recur.
Radiotherapy and chemotherapy, does a lot of damage to other cells despite the efforts of the doctors to minimize such effects. Radiotherapy has the greatest effect on rapidly dividing cells, which may be cancerous cells or normal cells like blood cells and sperm cells. Radiotherapy then could have great effects on these normal cells which may then lead to various complications. Chemotherapy is somewhat the same, furthermore, the drugs used in chemotherapy hare highly potent which means that it has the tendency to have adverse effects on other highly metabolic organs such as the liver. Gene therapy on the other hand, avoids such problems from occurring. The therapy generally involves the insertion of genes designed to treat cell specific diseases i.e. if there was a problem in the ovaries, the genes to treat the disease in the ovaries would be carried specifically and only to the ovaries; not in other tissues or organs.
In studies conducted concerning gene therapy, it was proven that this form of treatment was able to completely destroy or significantly reduce the growth of tumors in an animal model of ovarian cancer. In addition to that, there were no other adverse effects that were observed after the treatment, unlike what the conventional forms of cancer treatments. Such a case of ovarian cancer is, is found in more than 25,000 women in the United States every year (Science Daily, par. 2).
The Essay on Alternative Cancer Therapies part 1
Alternative Cancer Therapies As Deepak Chopra said: If you can wiggle your toes with the mere flicker of an intention, why can't you reset your biological clock? If you could live in the moment you would see the flavor of eternity and when you metabolize the experience of eternity your body doesn't age. Ayurveda is the science of life and it has a very basic, simple kind of approach, which is that ...
And these women, despite undergoing aggressive conventional forms of treatment for cancer, the survival rate or the prognosis of the disease is poor. Gene therapy offers prognoses which are much superior to those of the conventional treatments for cancer have to offer. Of an actual patient treated with gene therapy, it showed that that therapy was effective in stabilizing (preventing further growth of tumor) in 64% of the sample patients with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (Armandola, par.
8).
In addition to the relatively impressive capabilities of gene therapy when working on its own, it was suggested that gene therapy may also be used in conjunction with radiotherapy in order to treat cancers which have grown resistant to gene therapy. This combination can be viewed as one which is better in a sense that less damage would be elicited rather than radiotherapy combined with chemotherapy. Another test which involved thirty English and American Patients with head and neck cancer showed that gene therapy was indeed effective in reducing the size of the cancer cells and even making the vanish all together. Though the results proved to be temporary (cancer cells returned after treatment was stopped), gene therapy in combination again with conventional cancer treatment (chemotherapy), was able to greatly improve prognosis of the patient from the disease (BBC News, par. 5).
Chemotherapy cannot achieve the same results if worked alone. Gene therapy definitely shows that it has great potentials for treating cancer. In the future, it may even be effective against cancer in humans even if used alone just as it has been successful in stopping cancer in animal models. Conclusion Gene therapy definitely is a better form of treatment for cancer than conventional treatments for cancer. It is less invasive, and is much more target specific than other forms of treatment. Though the potentials of this form of therapy has yet to be fully extracted, it just shows further that in the future, gene therapy could be the treatment of choice for all forms of cancer, without the risk of giving further harm to the patients.
The Term Paper on Breast Cancer And New Treatments
... for more effective and less toxic therapy. One of the newest forms of breast cancer treatments is a monoclonal antibody called trastuzumab ... microscope. The most common sites of metastasis in breast cancer patients are the lymph glands located in the armpit. The ... (Cummings). New approaches involving reprogramming of the tumor cell genes and targeting of the blood vessels that feed tumors provide ...
Works Cited Armandola, Elena. Gene Therapy in Cancer Patients. Medscape General Medicine 4(4) 12 March 2002. Retrieved April 23, 2008 at: BBC News. Gene Therapy Cancer Treatment Success. 1 August 2000. Retrieved April 23, 2008 at: Cancer Treatment Centers of America.
Integrative Cancer Treatment. 2007. Retrieved April 23, 2008 at: Science Daily. Gene Therapy Completely Suppresses Ovarian Cancer Growth in Animal Model. University of Pittsburg Medical Center. 1 September 2006. Retrieved April 23, 2008 at: .
