This new therapy also aids stroke patients. Another procedure developed within the last few years is called embolization. A catheter is placed within an artery and chemicals are injected to stop blood flow to tumors or to vessels that are bleeding from trauma. Often tumors that are not surgically removable can be treated in this manner, prolonging the patient's life. My dream is for the day when doctors will be able to perform medical procedures inside the body using ultrasound or lasers that are relatively noninvasive.
Noninvasive medicine is wonderful.
As a student at BYU, you might be involved in the work of Professor William Pitt, who is developing ways of releasing chemotherapy drugs to specific locations in the body through ultrasound. Chemotherapy can be a miserable experience because, at present, the drug must be administered to the entire body. In Dr. Pitt's work the drug is bound in inert packages that do not release the drug until ultrasound is administered, and then the drug is confined to a local area. The illness associated with the procedure is thereby reduced. This interdisciplinary field produces miniature mechanisms the size of a human hair that can travel inside the human body to clean plaque from veins, monitor one's health, or perform microsurgery through remote control.