Cryotherapy and Cryosurgery for Cancer

Cancer is Epidemic

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and is responsible for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018.” They go on to mention that one in every six deaths that occurs is caused by cancer. And according to the New York Times, one in three Americans will be diagnosed with cancer, often before the age of 65. Indeed, these are frightening statistics! The loss of life due to cancer, is simply put, very tragic and it’s even harder to deal with when it happens to one of our family members.

Is There a Cure for Cancer?

Cancer has been declared an incurable disease, but what if there was a cure? Well, while there isn’t a single cure for all types of cancer, there are some treatment methods that can help.

Liver Cancer captured Before and after being treated with cryo. http://puhuahospital.com/treatments/cancer/cryosurgery

Helping Our Bodies Heal Itself

Did you know that the body is made to protect itself? We have built-in mechanisms that are meant to protect our bodies from getting attacked by various ailments, abnormalities, and even deformities. However, without helping our bodies to kick-start, and maintain these self-defense mechanisms that we’re blessed with, we don’t fully allow our bodies to do their job. Here’s an example, think about a person that you know who never exercises, and always gets sick. Now compare that person to someone else who exercises, eats healthy, and keeps their mental health in top shape. Which of these two people get sick more often?

We should all know that by staying healthy, we are helping our bodies fight and prevent diseases and even cancer. Staying super healthy might not be the easiest road for most, but like our example before, it is easier to spend the whole day watching TV rather than being in the gym, exercising, and keeping our physical and mental bodies healthy and in top shape.

Freezing Cancer Cells

In light of the above, there has been several new technologies that have offered an “advanced” method of treating cancer. Whole body and partial body cryotherapy (which is done through either a cryosauna or cryotherapy chamber that people walk into), as an example, can be used to help your body fight, and battle cancer. According to Cancer Research UK, cryotherapy uses extreme cold temperatures to destroy cancer cells. While cryosurgery is a more localized form of cryotherapy and consists of freezing off cancer cells, here, we’re triggering a fight-or-flight mode in our bodies to strengthen itself and enhance its ability to recover.

Cryosurgery as a Form of Cryotherapy

At this point we understand that you may be concerned about how this all works. Just how can one fight cancer using freezing cold temperatures? In our previous blog posts we mentioned how cryotherapy is commonly known as a form of cold treatment on the outer skin/tissues of our bodies. Cryosurgery (which involves freezing cancer cells) on the other hand, is a commonly used treatment of certain cancers such as cervix cancer, breast cancer, and other internal body cancers too. There are many physicians that can perform cryosurgery, and the right tools to perform these kinds of surgeries are available in local cryotherapy centers. Cryosurgery started back in the 1850s, and has successfully evolved over years, seeing the eventual development of various sophisticated cryosurgical devices currently in use.

Cryotherapy vs. Chemotherapy

Some of you may worry about the amount of pain and bleeding that could be caused during cryosurgery while treating cancer; let us assure you that there is no need to be afraid. The cryosurgery procedure can actually help you reduce bleeding and control the amount of pain that you go through. This comes as good news to all cancer patients since other conventional procedures that are used to prevent the spread of cancer, like chemotherapy, are known to cause so much pain during and after they are performed on a patient. With cryosurgery, the water that is in cancer cells is turned into ice, and the combination of this ice and the extreme cold, work to destroy the cancer cells in your body.

There are two distinctions between the conventionally used cancer treatment methods (such as chemotherapy, etc) and the use of cryotherapy and cryosurgery. The first being the fact that using cryotherapy for the treatment of cancer can have fewer known side effects than with conventional methods. Then comes the fact that cryotherapy/cryosurgery is much cheaper than other procedures (for example chemotherapy can sometimes cost thousands of dollars per procedure!). In the end, it becomes rather a personal choice between spending money on a painful procedure or looking into the more alternative (and sometimes more effective), and cheaper cryosurgery for cancer.

Whole Body Cryotherapy and Partial Body Cryotherapy

While we have mentioned cryotherapy in the above paragraphs, and explained how cryosurgery is used for cancer, there are other methods of cryotherapy that you ought to be made aware of. This is called Whole Body Cryothearpy (WBC) or Partial Body Cryotherapy (PBC) that many people still don’t know of. The difference between WBC and PBC lies in the distinction between the way which these two methods are implemented. With WBC, patients walk into a “refrigerated” room where they will be exposed to extreme low temperatures. While with partial body cryotherapy, patients enter into a capsule-like cryosauna with their heads left out of the machine and get blasted with air infused nitrogen gas. They are both very similar in the way they help our bodies recover and heal so they have a lot more in common than they appear to be different.

There also exists some other forms of more localized cryotherapy. New technologies have now been developed where patients can use machines that target certain parts of their bodies, like just one arm! You may want to give this a try if you want to focus on a specific part of your body, or if a part of your body is affected by a condition that is not allowing your entire body to be exposed to the extremely low temperatures in WBC or PBC.

Hacking Our Bodies To Be More Resilient

By now some of you may be asking, “well how does cryotherapy help our body fight cancer?” In short, cryotherapy promotes a number of activities inside the body, just as what we spoke about cryosurgery in the first paragraphs, that the body has to be helped to start the process of protecting itself.

For one, cryotherapy promotes our bodies’ ability to produce cold-shock-proteins that are meant to protect our cells (especially brain cells) from many things such as aging, chronic diseases, and inflammation. These proteins, upon completing the cryotherapy session, are released through our blood and are transported from our extremities to our internal organs were they help promote our bodies natural healing processes. This process promotes cell reproduction, even on areas where cells had been destroyed by cancer. Furthermore, cryotherapy promotes norepinephrine secretion, which has been know to prevent inflammation. It’s important to note that inflammation is highly linked to cancer and other chronic diseases and that norepinephrine is a natural anti-inflammatory hormone that can regulate the inflammation of our bodies.

Hope

In the end, we all wish to live in a cancer-free world. But, this has been a battle we have been fighting for centuries. We always feel the pain of the ones who have lost their loved ones through cancer, and as we mourn, we do not lose hope but always say words of encouragement to the ones facing this predicament: Nothing lasts forever and some things are yet to be beaten, like cancer. What we need is the courage to face, and fight cancer like soldiers in a ravaging war. Even if the war gets tough, we cannot afford to back off because we know that in the end, we ought to win it and go back to the life full of the love that we were given, and give to our loved ones.

Learn more about the benefits of cryotherapy and check out the featured cryotherapy clinical studies.