Japanese herbal kampo medicine individually contributes to alleviating side effects of cancer patients

Abstract

Cancer patients suffer from physical pain due to cancer itself and side effects by anticancer drugs, as well as social pain such as employment problems, psychological and spiritual pain. It is important to overcome these total pains with multidisciplinary medical care. Regarding drug treatment, if there is no drug effective in alleviating the patients' symptoms, it is necessary to develop a novel drug or drug repositioning to apply existing drugs. Among them, "Japanese herbal kampo medicine", introduced from China and developed in Japan, has come to occupy an important position as a complementary and alternative medicine to Western drugs.