There are few things I can think of that would be scarier than hearing the words, “You have cancer.” I can only imagine the terror that people feel when they receive the diagnosis, especially for those cancers that have spread or are more aggressive.
When thinking of all the changes that cancer has on someone’s life, many people think of the side-effects of treatment. Treatment for cancer can be very hard on the body. From hair loss to nausea to weight loss to chronic fatigue. These side-effects are extremely tough to deal with.
Perhaps naturally, as many people think about those they know who have dealt with these side-effects, some might question whether there are other alternatives. Alternative and complementary medicine and treatments for cancer have grown in prevalence over the past number of years with some studies estimating that up to 6/10 people with cancer use herbal supplements, a type of complementary treatment.
With this growth in prevalence, one has to ask, do these treatments help with cancer treatment? Do they increase survival? Do they make conventional treatments more manageable? Do they improve quality of life? Or, on the flipside, do these treatments increase risk of harm?
Overall, there isn’t a lot of great scientific evidence on alternative and complementary treatments for cancer as a whole. However, there have been a few studies published over the past few years that shed some light on the impact of alternative and complementary approaches to cancer.
Before we dive into those studies, though, let’s start with some basic definitions. First, a treatment is classified as “alternative medicine” or “complementary medicine” when it has not been proven to work or has been proven to not work. To paraphrase an old adage, once an alternative treatment has been proven effective with an acceptable risk-benefit, it is simply called “medicine.”
Treatment that is used instead of conventional medicine is called “alternative” medicine. Treatment that is used in addition to conventional treatment is called “complementary” medicine. Remember, again, that neither of these categories of treatments have been proven to work or they have been outright proven not to work.
Now to the science. In 2017, a study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that compared patients who chose alternative medicine to treat their cancer instead of conventional cancer treatment. The cancers included in this study were non-metastatic, meaning they had not spread to other parts of the body. For those familiar with staging, these cancers were stage I through stage III. Patients with stage IV cancer were not included.
The types of cancers included were four of the most common cancers: breast, prostate, lung, and colorectal cancer. Conventional cancer treatment was defined as chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, and/or hormone therapy.
Within the National Cancer Database, 281 patients who chose alternative medicine instead of any conventional cancer treatment were identified between 2004 and 2013. These patients were matched at a near 2:1 ratio to 560 conventional treatment patients based on cancer type, age, cancer stage, diagnosis year, race, and other variables for a total of 840 patients. In other words, each patient was matched to two others who were very similar in these variables.
So what were the results? Depending on your feelings towards this topic, the results may or may not surprise you.
Overall, patients who chose alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer treatment had a two-and-a-half times higher risk of death within five years than those who chose conventional cancer treatment. When broken out by cancer type, the risk of death within 5 years for using alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer treatment was 5.68 times higher for breast cancer, 4.57 times higher for colorectal cancer, and 2.17 times higher for lung cancer. The differences in prostate cancer were not significant, likely because prostate cancer tends to have a much longer natural course.
I don’t know about you, but those results are staggering to me. What’s worse, there are people out there who believe that conventional cancer treatment is all a conspiracy used to make pharmaceutical companies tons of money. While there is no doubt that cancer treatment is profitable to pharmaceutical companies, there are many alternative treatment providers who absolutely profit off those they convince to use their treatments. Based on the results of this study, one might conclude alternative medicine is essentially killing patients.
Now remember, all studies have limitations and we can only interpret this study considering the entire body of research on the topic. In the next few articles, I’ll cover some additional research into the topic.
(Nick McClary earned his doctor of physical therapy from the University of Tennessee. He also holds a masters in business administration. He is a native of Georgetown County, lives in Pawleys Island, and works in Murrells Inlet. Send him your health and fitness questions at: nmcclarydpt@gmail.com.)