Complementary therapy and cancer

Abstract

There has been increasing interest in complemensify.shtml. We fully recognize the overlap that exists tary and alternative approaches to health and illness. between conventional and alternative approaches This is a world wide phenomenon that crosses when one speaks of techniques such as stress manboundaries of disease, age, ethnicity, and education. agement, nutritional interventions, and psychological Why are people drawn to complementary therapies, support, all of which are strategies employed by particularly for chronic illness? What defines a many conventional health care providers yet they therapy as ‘unconventional’? How do patients select appear on the list of complementary therapies. alternative approaches to health and illness? How Our special attention to cancer reflects the reality should health care professionals deal with comthat it is often patients faced with life-threatening or plementary therapies? Should conventional health chronic disease that turn to other approaches. Cancer care professionals be expected to be knowledgeable is a model for looking at decision-making by patients about complementary therapies? who contemplate the realm of complementary The Special Issue of Patient Education and Countherapy. For those of us who provide cancer care, it seling will address some of these questions in is pressing that we develop an understanding of the relation to cancer care. The terms ‘complementary role of family physicians in decision-making by therapy’, ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ patients and their families and of the needs of all (CAM), ‘alternative and complementary therapy’ health care providers and their patients for increased (ACT), ‘unconventional therapy’, and ‘holistic care’ information about specific complementary therapies. have all been used to connote those preventive and We must also examine and modify the negative therapeutic approaches that do not fall under the attitudes we hold that have led our patients to usual heading of ‘biomedical’. Some authors have withhold their stories of usage of complementary differentiated between those interventions that are approaches. Yet we must do so while remaining true additive to conventional practice (complementary) to the scientific model in which we have been trained and those which are employed instead of conventionthat leads us to look for evidence of efficacy and al approaches (alternative). For simplicity, we have effectiveness. chosen to use the term ‘complementary therapy’ to We hope that this issue of Patient Education and refer to all entities for which there is limited or no Counseling will make evident that scientific stanscientific evidence that is accepted by the convendards can and must be applied to complementary tional bioscience community, whether additive or therapies for cancer, but that evidence of effectivealternative. We include all of those entities that ness must also include such things as quality of life appear on the list developed by the The National and feelings of hope. Patients have told us that these Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine outcomes matter as much or more as survival rate. in the United States. An up-to-date classification is Herbert et al. describe the process of a meeting to available at http: / /nccam.nih.gov/what-is-cam/classet a research agenda for decision-making by cancer