SCRAMBLING AWAY SEVERE PAIN.
The Osgood File. Sponsored in part by Kyocera. Intelligent printers and MFPs, customized apps and services to make your whole business more productive. Total Document Solutions Only From Kyocera. This is Charles Osgood.
Sometimes, cancer patients treated with chemotherapy suffer severe and chronic pain that doesn't go away - even if the treatment succeeds and the cancer does go away.
That's what happened to Karen Safranek...
SOT - Karen Safranek, breast cancer survivor
"On a scale of 1 to 10, it was like a 12. It was excruciating pain - like my feet and my legs were on fire. It's so hard to describe, because they felt so painful - yet they were numb." (:13)
Enter a machine called "The Scrambler" now being tested at the Mayo Clinic.
We'll tell you about it after this...
((( BREAK )))
The awful pain that breast cancer patient Karen Safranek suffered for years was caused by something called "peripheral neuropathy," says Dr. Charles Loprinzi of the Mayo Clinic...
SOT - Dr. Charles Loprinzi, Mayo Clinic
"It's a major problem from a number of chemotherapy drugs, probably the most prominent problem that we have these days. For some, it limits how much chemotherapy we can give. For some that get the chemotherapy, it gets better afterwards - but it stays there and can be a persistent problem for years." (:14)
That was the case with Karen - the pain was so severe she could barely walk.
When she heard about the clinical trial at the Mayo, she signed up right away.
Dr. Loprinzi says the Scrambler, which looks like a large car battery, is designed to break the pain cycle...
SOT - Dr. Charles Loprinzi
"You put electrodes on those nerves and you give them different electrical signals - and those different electrical signals kind of retrain the brain and say: 'Really, this isn't pain.'" (:08)
That's easy for him to say - but she says it, too.
The Scrambler therapy started working after the very first treatment - and after four treatments, the pain she had endured for more than a decade was gone...
SOT - Karen Safranek
"It was so incredible that I hadn't felt pain-free for so many years that I guess I didn't expect it to last..." (:10)
But it's been a year now, and Karen is still pain-free.
The Osgood File. Charles Osgood on the CBS Radio Network. |
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