Posted on 10/09/2025 5:27:05 AM PDT by Red Badger
If Zhen Xu hadn't annoyed her lab mates, she might never have discovered a groundbreaking treatment for liver cancer.
As a PhD student in biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan in the US during the early 2000s, Xu was trying to find a way for doctors to destroy and remove diseased tissue without the need for invasive surgery. She'd landed on the idea of using high-frequency sound waves – ultrasound – to mechanically break up tissue and was testing her theory on pig hearts.
Ultrasound isn't supposed to be audible to human ears, but Xu was using such a powerful amplifier in her experiments that other researchers she shared the laboratory with began to complain about noise. "Nothing had worked anyway," she says. So she decided to humour her colleagues by increasing the rate of ultrasound pulses, which would bring the sound level outside the range of human hearing.
To her shock, increasing the number of pulses per second – which also meant each pulse reduced in length to a microsecond – was not only less disruptive to those around her, but also more effective on living tissue than the approach she'd tried previously. As she watched, a hole appeared in the pig heart tissue within a minute of ultrasound application. "I thought I was dreaming," says Xu, who is today a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Michigan.
Decades later, Xu's serendipitous discovery, known as histotripsy, is one of several approaches using ultrasound that are ushering in a new era of advanced cancer treatment, offering doctors non-invasive methods to rid patients of cancerous tumours using sound rather than surgery.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Tobacco (nicotine) has been the cure for cancer since 1700's. Add some IVM to get the parasites linked to cancer, and no one dies.
I have 100% northern European skin plus the grave misfortune of growing up in south Florida, many decades ago.
In other words - thousands of hours of work, sports, and recreational sun exposure.
I have had three basal and one squamous cell skin cancers, plus another four suspicious lesions that I incinerated with pin pricks and blobs of Efudex (anti-metabolite cream).
As far as I am concerned, the USA Dermatology business is an ongoing train wreck for high risk skin cancer patients.
Preemptive cryo-ablation (freezing) is absurdly expensive, and Dermos just stare at your skin until they decide to chop something out and sent it to the Lab.
In a perfect world, Dermos (or RNs or PAs) would single out high risk patients and cryo-ablate everything that even looks suspicious!
I too am of Northern European stock and work outside most of the time. Despite that I wear a baseball cap I started getting skin lesions and had them removed by freezing. I started getting some more and began eating 8 apricot pits daily (I remove the skins). Not only are the lesions gone from my forehead, but the scaly patches disappeared off my arms, and a new mole shrank and faded.
“No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to DIE!”
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