Join your Pals at the Wednesday night dinners. The locations rotate among various restaurants in the Houston Medical Center area. See the schedule at the reception desk. 


Click the icon above for Proton Center Facebook Page in order to see Wednesday Night dinners schedules and other News.

Tell your ProtonPal friends about Joe's House to find housing in the Medical Center area. This link is also on the website and on MDACC website. 

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(More have been added 6/30/2012)

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Summer Edition

• Anderson Network's 24th annual Cancer Survivorship Conference 
• Friday, Sept. 14-Saturday, Sept. 15 at the Omni Houston Hotel Westside.  
• Susan G. Baker, wife of former secretary of state James A. Baker III and an ovarian cancer survivor treated at MD Anderson, is keynote speaker 
• Cost of conference is just $50, which includes all activities, meals and self-parking, if you register by Sept. 7. Registration available the day of the conference for $60.
• To register, visit the conference site at To Register Online  or call 713-792-2553.

The conference includes nearly two dozen informative breakout sessions, including:

• risks and benefits of vitamin and mineral supplements for cancer patients,managing treatment side effects,
• issues of young adult survivors,
• the healing power of journaling,
• making the most of your medicines during cancer care and 
• the popular medical panel will present an overview of their research and answer questions from the audience. It includes Ronald DePinho, M.D., president of MD Anderson; Holly Holmes. M.D., assistant professor in the Department of General Internal Medicine; and Karen Lu, M.D., professor in the Department of Gynecologic Oncology and Reproductive Medicine.       

Other keynote speakers are Richard Lee, M.D., medical director of the Integrative Medicine Program, and Shelby Robin, pediatric nurse and cancer survivor. Violinist and cancer survivor Treesa Gold will provide entertainment at the banquet on Sept. 14. 

For more information or to register, check the conference website or call 713-792-2553 in Houston, 800-345-6324 toll free.

 

The Anderson Network, an organization with support and educational services for patients/survivors, their families and caregivers, is a program of the Department of Volunteer Services

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Drew is taking a well deserved vacation with his Pals, Bob and Val Horner from Juneau Alaska.  Drew volunteers every Wednesday at the Proton Center as an

Drew and Bob in Juneau.

Anderson Network Volunteer and then he's tirelessly put together the Wednesday night dinners and the annual reunion for the patients who are in Houston for treatment or follow up visits. If you've talked with him any length of time I'm sure you know how he likes to fish, so I have some other photos of him spearing a large halibut. He wrote a note to me but did not say if met up with Todd, that other fisherman with a famous wife from Wasilla, but I'll ask him when he returns to Houston in a week or so. In his note last Saturday evening he commended his great hosts, Val and Bob, and then mentioned the best dinner he has ever had of king crab and halibut at the foot of Mendenhall Glacier.

The Dallas Center will be built in 2013 on a 4.5 acre site and funded by Advanced Particle Therapy, the company that is developing centers in San Diego, with Scripps Clinic Medical Group, in Baltimore with University of Maryland and in Atlanta with Emory University Healthcare.  UT SW News

In addition to the larger proton center planned by UT Southwestern, Baylor Health Care System is planning to build a smaller footprint system in an unspecified location in the Dallas area. Read More

 

Dr. Mahmood joined the "Team of Experts" at the Proton Therapy Center this summer as an Assistant Professor after completing a Fellowship at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Advanced Radiation Oncology and becoming board certified in radiation oncology.

He graduated from University of California Irvine in 2006, was an intern in Long Beach California and was a resident at University of Maryland Medical Center in radiation oncology for four years before accepting a Fellowship at M. D. Anderson.

When interviewed this is what he said:

"I chose MD Anderson because I wanted to be on the forefront of the development of cancer therapy and Radiation Oncology, in particular.  MD Anderson is an incredible institution with many opportunities and resources, making it a great place to launch my career.  I sought out the fellowship in order to gain further experience with proton therapy, which I believe is an exciting treatment modality, with the potential to improve outcomes/reduce side effects for our patients.  As for Houston, my family and I have enjoyed our time here this past year.  We've found Houston to be large and diverse, with more than enough things to do to keep us busy."

 

He joined the Proton Center in June 2012 and is Assistant Professor, Radiation Oncology Department was assigned to the Proton Therapy Team of Genitourinary Experts (Meet Our Team of Experts)

Dr. Charles E. Myers, founder of the AIDP Clinic in Charlottesville Va. is a 13 year aggressive cancer survivor and personally knows the results of avoiding PSA testing. When he showed up for an exam13 - 14 years ago his PSA was 20 and he had a Gleason of 7 with some spreading in the lymph nodes and presence in his bone marrow. He's been a successful survivor and that's why he's so incensed at the USPSTF for recommending that the US male population not be tested. Yes he supports the idea that there is an over-treatment problem where some 90% of the small Gleason 6s are treated with radical prostatectomy at the regional level, but by stopping PSA testing the panel is also condemning to death the men at the other end of the scale who may have the aggressive type.

He forecasts we will return to the level of 1983 where men were not coming to their doctors until they had symptoms.
 
He cites two examples of what the doctors will see coming out of an unscreened population. The first of a man who physically was the picture of health but who also had doctor-phobia. He avoided testing for 5 years and when he showed up at his clinic with pain in his shoulder, his PSA was 1100, had resistance to hormone therapy, all they could talk about was the type of chemotherapy to use
 
The other man from Australia was diagnosed a number of years ago with a Gleason 7 and a PSA of 16. After studying the treatment options decided the benefits were not clear cut enough and he would wait until he had symptoms. By the time he had symptoms his PSA was 8000 or 9000. He ended up comatose in a hospice where his PSA was 9147. He was given Casodex (bicalutamide) and fortunately had a major response, woke up and was able to travel to Charlottesville for treatment.

Bottom Line: 
The consequence of not screening a population is that doctors will be seeing men where the cancer is wide spread, where it will be the aggressive type, more difficult to treat and with lower odds of being cured successfully.  He forecasts that these numbers are going to skyrocket and the number of prostate cancer deaths will increase dramatically. He calls it a callous disregard of the medical science and published results of randomized control trials; and in effect "these men are condemned to death."

Please listen to his 7 minute video blog from July 26, 2012 at Ask Dr. Myers and let us hear from you.

As a ProtonPal you've probably been treated for prostate cancer at the Proton Therapy Center. For that mode of treatment you had to take 5 to 6 weeks out of your work to travel to and live in Houston for daily treatments; or if you live in the Houston region you may have commuted daily carving out a 2 - 3 hour block out of your working day.

If so, researchers from the Southwest ADA Center (www.southwestada.org), and SEDL (www.sedl.org, would like to invite you to complete a survey about cancer survivors employment-related issues. They will give you a gift card to thank you for your time.  Please call Kathleen Murphy, PhD at 1-800-476-6861, or send email to dbtac@sedl.org for more information. Ella habla español.

The purpose of the study is to document the employment-related needs of people with cancer.  We will use our findings to help employers, healthcare providers and other people with cancer to be more aware of cancer survivors' employment-related needs and how to address them.

All personnel data collected from participants is confidential and NO employers will be identified in published reports.

The Southwest ADA Center is funded by the federal Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) and is based at TIRR Memorial Hermann's ILRU (Independent Living Research Utilization) program. For more information about the Southwest ADA Center, visit www.southwestada.org. This research project is in collaboration with SEDL, a non-profit educational research organization based in Austin.

 

I try to aggregate news and articles which I, along with Dave and Drew read almost daily and pass them on to you. Just in case this is news to you or you're a new patient and may not know what a great newsletter Bob Marckini and his daughter Debbie Hickey write every month. So I'm not going to clip what he wrote except to give you a taste for the subjects he covered in his July Newsletter, a table contents so to speak. 

• Issues with the USPSTF recommendation to stop PSA testing.
• A summary on new prognostic tests for PSA serum levels 
• Why a radiation oncologist chose protons.

Bob's book, You Can Beat Prostate Cancer, is available in Amazon's Kindle format. Don't have a Kindle but have a PC or iPad? No problems Kindle ebook readers are available for free and can be downloaded. 

 

Read more  BOB Tales for July 2012

 

If you follow Dr. Myers blog you'll recall that a key part of his PCa Growth Arrest Program is the Mediterranean Diet or a standard heart healthy diet and lifestyle that fits the recommendations of the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. Do yourself a favor and download this 28 page guide and take the ACS Nutrition and Activity quiz. Download the Nutrition Guide. and start your own PCa Growth Arresting Program.

About the ProtonPals Organization
Thanks for subscribing  to the newsletter and using the ProtonPals website. We won't sell or give your addresses to anyone. You'll receive one or at most two mailings a month from us. If you're a new subscriber you may want to note that the past newsletters are archived back to May 2009. Newsletter Archives

We're a group who chose proton beam therapy to cure their cancer and were treated at University of Texas M.D. Anderson Proton Therapy Center in Houston, Texas. The "Pals" formed a network in order to:

Stay up to date with treatment cure results

Provide support to others and Center activities

Be informed on any side- effects

Promote proton radiation since it's widely regarded to have a significant advantage over conventional x-rays.

Attract and nurture more Pals who support our cause, patient-to-patient and friend-to-friend