Amaravati has emerged as the place with the best infrastructure for treatment of cancer in the new Andhra Pradesh. Corporate hospitals have risen to the occasion to fetch state-of-the-art machines for external radiation therapy.
Manipal Hospitals has over a decade developed the infrastructure for the treatment of “liquid” cancers like leukaemia and lymphomas. No hospital in Visakhapatnam is fully equipped to treat liquid tumours.
Amaravati has hospitals with world-class cancer care institutes like American Oncology Institute at NRI College located between Vijayawada and Guntur, Manipal Hospitals on the right bank of Krishna River and a new one —Nagarjuna Cancer Centre — is going to be inaugurated by Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Saturday.
HCG has a tie-up with the Curie City Cancer Centre and is the only one with PET scan facility in the city.
Manipal Hospitals has a highly advanced LINAC Machine that is able to not only locate but also kill tumours with great precision. The entire range of radiation equipment that is being used for curing cancer is available at Manipal. Starting with Three Dimensional Radiotherapy (3DCRT), the hospital has equipment and staff to perform Stereotactic Radio Surgery (SRS) in which small brain tumours and functional abnormalities of the brain could be treated.
Despite its name, SRS was a non-surgical procedure in which higher doses of radiation (X rays) were used to kill the tumour, explained Rangaraya Medical College associate professor A.Y. Rao.
Nagarjuna Cancer Centre is equipped with the TrueBeam Radiotherapy System which is a fully-integrated system for image-guided radiotherapy and radio surgery. It can treat cancer in any part of the body like lungs, breast, prostate, head and neck.
Options to patients
Manipal Hospitals is offering to cancer patients free of charge the services of IBM’s Watson Supercomputer which gives several treatment options and even gathers evidences specific to the patients’ health needs.
American Oncology Institute medical director N. Subba Rao said that cancer treatment had seen revolutionary changes in the Amaravati region. In the next five years, it would be the best destination for cancer treatment in the country.
Manipal Hospitals Cancer Department head G. Krishna Reddy said that sentiment and money were big obstacles from people coming to Amaravati for treatment. The poor had to go compulsorily go to places where they could get free treatment and a few more years was needed for people to develop confidence in the institutions here. “It took nearly 20 years for people to develop confidence in institutions in Hyderabad after the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh from Madras. It may not take so long for people to gain confidence in hospitals in Amaravati,” Dr. Reddy said.
