Unproven cancer therapy lures U.S. men to Mexico

Article from The New York Times
By Stephanie Saul
PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico - Some weekends, more than a dozen American men wait at beachfront hotels, eager for their turns in the treatment room at a small private hospital here.

They are medical tourists with prostate cancer. And they are queued up for the latest therapy - one advertised with pictures of couples strolling on the beach and pitched as a way to treat patients’ disease while preserving their sex lives.

The treatment is called high-intensity focused ultrasound, or HIFU (pronounced HIGH-foo). And instead of using surgery or radiation, it attacks the cancerous tissue by heating the prostate to temperatures near boiling.

Tropical beaches aside, there is a reason that hundreds of American men have traveled out of the country to receive HIFU. It is not approved in the United States. And its growing popularity has some cancer experts voicing caution over US HIFU, the company sponsoring the offshore treatment weekends… Continued - Read more on the Seattle Times website