Treating Mesothelioma

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dr. Bill Hughson, a a clinical professor of medicine at The University of California, San Diego, and I am the director of the UCSD Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Most surgeons who do this would agree that the surgery is meant to be life extending and not really curative. Once in a great while people are are cured. That's when there's tumors discovered at a very early stage and can be removed entirely. That doesn't happen very often. Another point to make here is that if you're considering that type of aggressive surgery you need to go to medical centers who do this operation on a regular basis. Now, this is major surgery. There are significant morbidity; that's illness following the surgery, and there is significant mortality associated with the surgery. You want an experienced surgeon, and probably even more important, you want an experienced team. The quality of the anesthesia, and in particular the quality of the nursing support, is absolutely critical to the outcome. You do not want to go someplace where they have not done this operation before, or they maybe they've done it once or twice. The final modality is radiation and that can be given either before or after surgery. So, to summarize that the approaches are chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation."