Hope for cancer patients??
Australia just did something no other country has ever done.
Doctors in Sydney are now killing cancer tumours by freezing them solid — no scalpel, no stitches, no surgery at all.
It's happening at Liverpool Hospital in southwest Sydney, home to Australia's first MRI-guided cryoablation machine.
Here's how it works.
A needle thinner than a few millimetres is threaded into the tumour while doctors watch every move in real time on the MRI.
Then gas shoots through it, dropping the temperature to around minus 180°C in seconds.
The tumour freezes into a tiny "ice ball." The cancer cells rupture. The blood supply chokes off. The tumour dies.
No cutting. No bleeding. No weeks of recovery.
One of the first patients was Josephine Cordina, 64, who'd been living with a 9mm tumour buried in her spine. The pain stole her sleep. Painkillers barely touched it. Open surgery would've meant screws in her spine and weeks flat on her back.
Instead, doctors froze it.
One day later, she walked out of the hospital pain-free.
That's the part that sounds impossible — most patients go home within 24 hours and skip the long hospital stay entirely.
It works on tumours in the spine, the liver, the kidneys. And it gives hope to people who were told they were too old, too sick, or too high-risk for traditional surgery.
The future of cancer treatment might not involve a single cut.
Source: Liverpool Hospital, Sydney (Australia's first MRI-guided cryoablation procedure)