LongStories_net

Medical physicist here - you probably received photon beam radiation. That’s the overwhelmingly most common type of radiation therapy.

Photon beam radiation is basically light. When it enters your body it delivers the most energy (damage) about 1.5cm past the surface and then delivers less and less energy as it passes through your body. We can superimpose these beams from different directions and actually modulate and shape them to focus massive amounts of energy on the tumor and largely avoid important organs. Although we minimize damage as much as possible, a big disadvantage of this technique is that the beams continue to travel through the body causing damage after they pass through the cancer. This can lead to undesirable side effects.

In contrast, proton therapy is essentially a particle that stops in the cancer and deposits nearly all of its energy in that location. Like photons it will do some damage traveling toward the cancer, but almost no damage whatsoever after it arrives at the cancer. This should theoretically greatly decrease unwanted side effects (or allow us to increase the dose substantially without additional side effects).

In reality, for most cancers we haven’t yet found that proton beam therapy is superior to photon therapy. For the OP it most likely is extremely advantageous because there are many important areas of the brain that can suffer radiation damage and lead to terrible consequences (unlike fat or muscle, for example).

We’ve been doing particle beam therapy for a very long time. It’s just been cost prohibitive to install and run/maintain the machine unless you are a large academic institution like MD Anderson. The price has come down a lot, but some newer sites are already starting to go bankrupt because there’s not yet clinical proof for most locations that it’s superior to photon beam therapy (although theoretically it’s much better).

Although proton therapy is extremely popular/trendy right now, there are a lot of researchers that believe it will only prove beneficial for cancers that require incredible precision (pedi’s, some brain, some spine, etc). Similarly, there are people that believe the opposite - that it will become standard of care for the majority of cancers (and, of course, there are those in between).

• This is all greatly simplified and I wrote it using my phone so I apologize for any mistakes.

I see your charity is listed on smile.amazon.com.

For everyone that uses Amazon, if you order through smile.amazon.com you can select a charity and Amazon will donate to that charity a small percentage of all of your purchases.

It's not a lot, but if enough people use the service, it can raise a substantial amount of money.

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Now for a question - how much time does it take to run your charity and how difficult was setting it up?

My daughter has Pompe Disease and I've often thought of starting a charity with more of a focus on research than other available charities.

After their most recent money raise they’re valued at over $1 billion.

I don’t know why they’re being misleading.

Venture capitalists are paying.

And good for them. It’s brilliant to build a great humanitarian product while simultaneously building it into a massively valuable company.

How do the airlines lose money when you've purchased a ticket and choose not to fly?

The only thing I can think of this that perhaps they could have sold the ticket to someone else for more money? This isn't very likely as the airlines use incredibly complicated algorithms to determine ticket prices.