Word: tumors
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...rainy day last May, 29-year-old Leslie Harvey, taxi driver, decided to clean out an old, locked closet on the upstairs landing in the shabby boardinghouse on West Kinmel Street owned by his mother, Mrs. Sarah Jane Harvey, 65. She had been under treatment for a cancerous stomach tumor, and he planned to have the house spruced up as a surprise for her when she got back from the hospital. Forcing the bolt of the closet, he opened the door and fell back in horror. Huddled on the floor at his feet, under thick layers of cobwebs and dust...
...says Dr. Lionel S. Auster of New York's Bronx Hospital. Speaking at last week's second International Meeting on Forensic Pathology and Medicine at the New York University Medical Center, Dr. Auster said: "Experimentally, a single trauma has never been able to initiate a malignant tumor...
Admitting dourly that "it is rare indeed to find a patient who cannot relate some trauma to his tumor," Dr. Auster said careful analysis of well-documented cancer cases shows a possible causal relationship between physical injury and cancer in only about six out of every 100,000 cases. Said Auster: "Twenty-five thousand people a day are reputedly injured in the U.S. Only four people per thousand have tumors. Were trauma to have significance in tumor genesis, we should be overrun with patients suffering from cancer incited by war injuries, surgical operations, biopsy procedures, industrial and sports accidents...
...Auster, citing specific cases. Sample: The scalp of a 45-year-old construction laborer, superficially grazed by a swinging hook on the end of a derrick cable, later developed a friable, fungating ulceration. X rays showed "extensive metastatic involvement"; cancer had spread to the head from a primary tumor in the workman's kidney. The cancer had obviously been spreading for months before the accident, and the scalp injury only served to call attention to it. Nevertheless, said Auster, the court granted a "substantial" award...
Trauma can aggravate an already existing growth by disrupting its capsule, said Dr. Auster. An injury in the area of a tumor may cause an increase in the growth's size-by hemorrhage, cell destruction or infection. But for the patient who had a tumor and didn't know it, this might be helpful, not harmful. In other cases, physical trauma in the tumor area, said Dr. Auster, may even have a distinct beneficial effect: by destroying the cells, it may cause the tumor itself to heal...