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Treatment Options You Won’t Find at Other Cancer CentersYou can be confident you’ll receive the right treatment, because we offer them all. Lehigh Valley Hospital is a referral center for skin cancer for major cancer centers. Melanoma is the most serious form of skin cancer. The Cancer Center at Lehigh Valley Hospital is committed to helping patients fight this cancer by offering the most advanced treatments available. To make sure we provide state-of-the-art treatment, we have recruited melanoma experts who studied at nationally recognized centers of excellence. Dr. Paul Mosca completed his surgical residency at Duke University Medical Center, one of the nation’s first NCI-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center and research fellowship. Dr. Suresh Nair completed his fellowship in hematology and oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which is a national leader in the treatment of melanoma. Your treatment is personalized to your medical needs. Whether a treatment is widely available or confined to just a handful of leading cancer centers, it is available at Lehigh Valley Hospital. In fact, we are a melanoma referral center for other leading cancer centers in the region. Some of the treatments and procedures for melanoma available at Lehigh Valley Hospital include: Immunotherapy (Interleukin-2 therapy for advanced melanoma)Immunotherapy is a treatment that stimulates your immune system to fight cancer. This immunotherapy has helped shrink cancers in 10 to 20 percent of patients with Stage III and Stage IV melanoma (the most serious). Because this treatment has serious side effects, it is only available at a limited number of cancer centers where doctors have extensive experience with the treatment. Lehigh Valley Hospital’s Cancer Center is one of the experienced centers.Chemotherapy (Isolated limb infusion for advanced melanoma of the arm or leg)This is an experimental chemotherapy that temporarily separates the circulation of your arm or leg from the rest of the body. High doses of chemotherapy are injected into the artery feeding the limb. The rest of your body doesn’t get exposed to the high doses and this avoids serious side effects.Removal of lymph nodes (Lymph node dissection)Your doctor needs to know if the cancer has spread to the lymph nodes near the melanoma. If your lymph nodes feel abnormally large and hard, your doctor will do a fine needle aspiration biopsy. This uses a very narrow needle to draw out tissue and fluid from one lymph node.If the biopsy shows cancer that has spread (metastatic melanoma), the doctor will remove all the lymph nodes near the melanoma and examine every one to see how many contain cancer. Removing lymph nodes may not prolong your survival but could avoid the pain caused by cancer growing in the lymph nodes. However, the removal of lymph nodes can have an uncomfortable, permanent side effect called lymphedema, where fluid collects in the arm or leg. Sentinel lymph node biopsyThis can avoid the unnecessary removal of lymph nodes. If your lymph nodes don’t feel large or hard, your doctor can do a sentinel lymph node biopsy. The sentinel lymph node is not a specific lymph node. It is the first lymph node that responds to this test. The doctor injects a radioactive dye into the melanoma. The first lymph node to pick up the dye is called the sentinel node. The doctor removes this lymph node and does a biopsy. If the sentinel node shows no cancer, the rest of your lymph nodes don’t have to be removed. If you do have cancer in the sentinel node, the disease is automatically classified as Stage III melanoma. The doctor will then usually remove all other lymph nodes in the area.Our doctors remind you, the sooner you begin treatment for melanoma, the better. For a first or second opinion, call 877-722-HOPE (4673) or 610-402-CARE. This page last updated 2/12/08 04:08 PM
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