to successfully guide patients away from them.
In the remaining chapters of this book, we will focus on complementary therapies, designed to be used in conjunction with mainstream cancer treatment. When used correctly, these therapies can provide relief, both during treatment and following treatment, of side effects caused by cancer treatments or by the cancer itself.
Complementary Therapies—The Basics
Benjamin, age 54 with leukemia, discussing outpatient massage therapy
“I felt like you came for ‘me,’ and not for my disease, which is why everyone else comes, too. You helped ‘the whole me,’ not just the cancer, and I’ve learned so much about how to relax, and breathe, and calm down. Thank you so much.”
What Complementary Therapies Can Do for You
Complementary therapies empower you, the patient. After being diagnosed with cancer, you might feel like you are ceding control to a team of experts—your medical oncologist, radiation oncologist, and surgeon, not to mention their nurses and technicians. Together, all of these experts can give you the best quality care available for your condition. But it’s not uncommon to feel lost in such a system.
Integrative medicine puts the ball back in your court. It offers a broad array of therapies and lifestyle choices that not only make a real difference for your health and happiness, but also give you back a sense and reality of control and confidence.
There are many things you can do to maintain the best possible physical and emotional health throughout your cancer treatment and beyond. You can eat better, be physically active, and manage your stress through mind-body techniques. Acupuncture treatment and massage therapy will help minimize unwanted symptoms of chemotherapy or radiation. For example, studies suggest that acupuncture can be very helpful for reducing nausea and vomiting, as well as hot flashes that may arise if you are prescribed hormonal therapy. Acupuncture is successful at promoting relaxation, reducing stress, and diminishing pain, as well.
Most major cancer centers across the country, and many community hospitals, now have integrative medicine departments that offer some or all of these therapies, both on an inpatient and outpatient basis. Talk to your oncologist, but also consider speaking with a physician who specializes in integrative medicine or an expert in integrative medicine who specializes in working with cancer patients. They can help guide you to the best complementary therapies for particular problems. They can help you develop a comprehensive treatment plan that achieves the greatest synergy between the mainstream and complementary domains, giving you the best chance of beating your cancer while helping you live as comfortably as possible through the course of treatment and thereafter.
Modalities in the integrative medicine realm can be categorized in different ways. Some involve long-term lifestyle changes, and others are treatments you can receive from a practitioner once a week or so. Still others you can learn and then practice entirely on your own in the comfort of your own home.
Before we begin a discussion of specific complementary therapies, it is important to consider how researchers determine if a particular therapy works, or doesn’t. It is research results that provide confidence that a therapy may provide the desired result.
What Is Proper Research?
In proper research, following promising clinical or laboratory results, a new therapy is pilot tested to determine best dosage and other important preliminary information. If the new therapy appears safe and effective, a larger, more definitive clinical trial is conducted. This trial will be “randomized,” which means that patients will be randomly assigned to receive or not receive the therapy during the trial’s duration. Determined by an electronic version of a coin-toss random allocation, patients will either belong to a group receiving the new treatment or to a group receiving the standard treatment for that specific cancer diagnosis.
Then, the two or more groups of subjects are followed in exactly the same way, receiving the same tests, visits, etc. Patients and their caregivers do not know to which group they were randomly assigned. Proper randomization balances known and unknown factors that might influence results, helping to assure that their results are not influenced by patient perceptions and are valid. Randomized clinical trials are lengthy and expensive, but they have produced the major advances in cancer treatment that led to the more than 67 percent survival rate of U.S. patients across all cancers.
Complementary treatments offer cancer patients many important advantages. They range from extended survival (exercise) to relieving stress, anxiety, and other symptoms (acupuncture, mind-body therapies, etc.). The several types of complementary therapies that have been studied and found to be beneficial for many cancer patients are profiled on the pages that follow, along with warnings as needed. Beneficial approaches include: diet and being savvy about supplements, physical fitness, acupuncture, mind-body therapies, massage therapies, and creative therapies. In the sections that follow, we’ll look at each of these beneficial approaches, the research results, and what benefit each may offer to cancer patients.
Mary, 47-years old with multiple myeloma
“I was so surprised that guided imagery really helped me. I almost felt childish at first, like escaping to a fantasy world, but really enjoying the visualization actually allowed me to feel free and powerful. I don’t have to be trapped by my circumstances; I can choose how to help myself through this.”
What you eat matters. A simple, perhaps obvious fact, but one that is too frequently overlooked. There is little doubt that what we eat has an impact on our risk of diseases such as cancer, and on the progression of those diseases after diagnosis. The nature of this connection has been, and continues to be, the subject of much scientific research. Although we have a lot more to learn, certain guidelines are becoming well established.
Excessive consumption of red meat, highly processed meats, and other sources of animal fat seems to promote cancer, whereas increased consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat animal foods may help to hinder it. Some important basic principles follow. A prospective study of 4,577 men with prostate cancer found that eating foods with trans fat, also called unsaturated fat, was associated with increased risk of all-cause death. Replacing carbohydrates and animal fat with vegetable fat may reduce the risk of all-cause death in prostate cancer, and consumption of vegetable fat may benefit men with prostate cancer.1
In a major overview of large, high-quality studies in patients with breast cancer, most found that higher intake of saturated fat before diagnosis was associated with increased risk of death. Moreover, higher monounsaturated fat intake both before and after breast cancer diagnosis was associated with increased risk of cancer-specific and all-cause mortality. Although further research is needed, it appears that consumption of “bad” fats increases breast cancer recurrence and mortality, whereas omega-3 fats seem to be beneficial.2
The bottom line is that lifestyle choices matter for improving survival after a cancer diagnosis. Survivors should continue to focus on maintaining a healthy weight, being physically active, avoiding smoking, and choosing a diet comprised
