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Section 7
Complementary and Alternative
Medicine
THE SCOPE
OF ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE IN ONCOLOGY
There
are many alternatives out there — products and approaches promoted
on the Internet and in magazines as alternatives to mainstream care
that are touted as natural, easy, simple cures to cancer. My reading
of various studies suggests that about 75 percent of cancer patients
try something over-the-counter or some kind of alternative remedy,
although not necessarily exclusively.
However, we
do know from extrapolation of previous research that about eight
to ten percent of newly diagnosed patients — tissue biopsy-diagnosed
patients with all kinds of cancers — go directly to an alternative
practitioner, and this is a very serious problem. It’s a small
percentage of the total, but that small percentage turns out to
be a very large number of human beings that we have to worry about.
And these are patients who will go to an alternative practitioner
for six months or a year while their disease continues to grow unabated.
And when they realize that it’s not working, they will eventually
go back to the hospital where they were diagnosed or to some other
hospital or cancer center, and usually they are beyond hope of cure
and sometimes beyond hope of treatment at that point. It ’s
a very, very sad situation.
—Barrie
Cassileth, PhD
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