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Title: Men with cancer turning to alternative cures
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20111412-22947.html
Published: Dec 22, 2011
Author: staff
Post Date: 2011-12-22 01:54:19 by Tatarewicz
Keywords: None
Views: 116
Comments: 5

More than 50% of men diagnosed with cancer in Australia are turning to complementary and alternative medicine to help find a cure, or to improve their health, according to new research from the University of Adelaide.

Psychology PhD student Nadja Klafke says an Adelaide questionnaire of 400 men with various types of cancer shows that many of them modify their diet in conjunction with conventional treatment, as well as turning to meditation, yoga and exercise.

The study, recently published in Annals of Oncology, provides evidence that the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is common and widespread in men with cancer.

"Many complementary therapies have the potential to help reduce common side-effects of cancer treatment and disease symptoms," Ms Klafke says.

"For example, published data shows that acupuncture and acupressure may relieve chemotherapy- induced nausea and vomiting, hypnosis and massage are beneficial for cancer-related pain, and meditation and relaxation techniques can relieve fatigue," Ms Klafke says.

"The popularity of CAM use in cancer sufferers presumably reflects the benefits - real or perceived - by those who use them."

Dietary supplements are the most common natural therapy used by men suffering cancer. Prayer has been identified as the second most popular CAM therapy and herbs and botanicals rank third, despite warnings from cancer clinicians that herbs such as Echinacea, St John's wort, Ginseng and Gingko biloba can react badly with prescribed medications.

The study suggests that many men are turning to alternative options because they are either dissatisfied with the results from conventional medical treatments, or pressured by their spouse or family to try something different.

While this study focused on male cancer outpatients living in Adelaide, other studies around the world have demonstrated that culture plays a large part in determining which herbs and dietary supplements are favoured.

Ms Klafke says the findings show that oncologists are not aware that most male cancer patients use alternative treatments in conjunction with conventional medicine.

"It would definitely be worth clinicians having an open discussion with their patients about the efficacy and safety of complementary and alternative medicine. A better understanding of the role, reasons for use and benefits of CAM may lead to more holistic approaches to care," she says.

The study is the first in the world to specifically assess CAM use by men with a wide variety of cancers.

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#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)

Not a new phenomenon. When I was very young, and there were virtually no cures for any sort of cancer, people with the diagnosis were flocking to fakes like Hoxey for "alternative" treatments.

Shoonra  posted on  2011-12-22   13:37:11 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Well, you're wrong, Shoonra, about alternative treatments being "fake". Since August of 2008, I have been using Ginger and Turmeric to fight ovarian cysts and future possibility of cysts in breasts. Much thanks to many contributors on this very forum, Turmeric is an ancient old remedy used to treat people with many diseases.

purplerose  posted on  2011-12-22   16:31:19 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

I use colloidal silver and a Rife Machine. Soon plan to include HHO water specially made, no electrolyte needed so no risk of accidentally producing unwanted other chlorides.

I support the occupation

titorite  posted on  2011-12-22   16:39:26 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

I remember hearing about collodial silver about 10 years ago on the radio. Never tried it though.

purplerose  posted on  2011-12-23   1:30:30 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

Plus placebos sometimes work as well as big pharma's pricy pills, with no side effects:

www.slate.com/articles/he...ut_trust_meitll_work.html

Pediatrician Adrian Sandler works at a busy referral center in Asheville, N.C., where he often treats kids with ADHD. Many parents worry about the long-term effects of stimulants, the standard treatment for the disorder, but when kids quit or cut back, their symptoms often spiral out of control. So a few years ago, Sandler decided to replace some of the medicine in each of the doses he gave out with a green-and-white placebo capsule that contained no medication. By pairing the placebo with a stimulant, he hoped to spark a conditioned response, just as Russian Nobel Laureate Ivan Pavlov had done with his famous dogs. Where Pavlov had trained his dogs to salivate at the sound of a buzzer, Sandler hoped to make kids with ADHD calm down in response to a fake pill.

Plenty of doctors already give placebos as medicine. In a survey of 679 physicians published in 2008, more than 46 percent of respondents said they regularly prescribe placebos, usually in the form of a relatively harmless drug that they know has no effectiveness for the patient's complaint. Bioethicists generally frown on such deceptions, out of concern that these lies will erode the patient-physician relationship. No one goes to the doctor for a kiss on her boo-boo; people go to doctors with the trust that they'll offer an effective treatment. If you find out that the "drug" you were prescribed was actually a sugar pill, this trust is undermined, and that's why American Medical Association guidelines forbid giving placebos without a patient's consent.

But Sandler figured he could get around the ethics problem by telling the parents and kids up front that they were getting a placebo, with the promise that this placebo-drug combo had the potential to control their symptoms just as well as the full dose, but with fewer side effects. He tested the idea in 99 children, randomly assigned to one of three treatments. The first group continued to take their regular dose of medication, another took half their optimal dose, and the third was instructed to take a half dose of their meds plus a placebo pill that was described as a "dose extender." Before the study began, researchers explained to the parents and the kids, aged 6 to 12, that the dose extender contained no active ingredient. After eight weeks, the symptoms of ADHD had grown more severe in kids who took only a half dose, but they remained stable in the groups that received either the full dose or the half dose plus placebo. Advertisement

The ADHD study, which was published last summer, isn't the only one to show a benefit from giving placebos without pretending that they're real drugs. A trial that came out in PLoS ONE last December found that patients with irritable bowel syndrome who were treated with placebo pills for three weeks and told that the pills were "made of an inert substance, like sugar" achieved greater improvements in their symptoms than those who received no treatment. In fact, the placebo's effectiveness in this study rivaled that of other drugs used to treat the condition. With ethical problems solved, placebos might thus serve as part of a "wait and watch" approach to treating irritable bowel syndrome and other problems. Doctors could hold off on doling out potent drugs while still offering their patients a tangible treatment. And placebos don't just have fewer side effects than standard pharmaceuticals, they presumably cost less, too.

While Sandler and Ted Kaptchuk, lead author of the irritable bowel syndrome study, say that while their so-called "open placebos" don't hinge on deception, they do employ some sleight of hand. A doctor who uses an open placebo is like a magician. The trick is performed with full disclosure that it is, in fact, a trick, but it still requires a subtle form of deception to execute. For the placebo to work, the patient must suspend disbelief at the doctor's urging. Kids in the ADHD study were told that, "the mind and body work together in interesting ways and placebos are known to work sometimes but no one knows why," while researchers told patients in the IBS trial that placebos "have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes." While some might argue that it's not lying to tell patients the placebo might help if that's what the doctor really believes—and there is ample evidence that placebos often work—even "truthful" manipulations like this raise ethical questions. Deception is verboten in medicine because it violates a patient's trust, and shaping a patient's expectations exploits that trust.

Yet doctors do this every day, often to the benefit of their patients. Randy Gollub, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston tells of a colleague who treated a man for gout. The patient had tried numerous drugs without relief, and the sole remaining drug had a 50 percent chance of helping. Instead of saying, "This drug is your last resort, but it only works about half the time," he told the patient, "This drug doesn't help everybody, but it helps some people and I think it could help you." Both statements are true, she says, but the second description was more likely to elicit a beneficial response.

Such framing sounds innocuous, but how far can it go before it becomes unethical? The ADHD and irritable-bowel data show that you can increase a patient's chances of being helped by telling him that he's likely to respond to a placebo pill. But you can also increase the benefit by asking him to pay some extra money, since studies show that expensive placebos work better than cheaper ones. And more invasive placebos—sham injections, say—are known to have more of an effect than inert pills or ointments. A doctor who really wants to help a patient might even offer a fake surgical procedure, in which an anesthetic is given and a cut is made, but nothing else. These procedures have rivaled the effectiveness of real surgeries in at least one clinical trial, but they're far more costly than a sugar pill and, given their reliance on knives and anesthetics, they impose their own risks.

Judging a placebo treatment's ethics solely by its use of deception—and viewing the limits of deception in rather legalistic terms (well, we didn't exactly lie to the patient …)—overlooks important nuances. If you told a patient to expect some kind of mind-body benefit from a sham surgery, that would be less deceptive than a sugar pill given surreptitiously. But judge these treatments by their effect on the patient's welfare, and the pill might come out ahead. If deception is the critical factor from the perspective of bioethics, how do you know you've truly eliminated it? Do people who receive a placebo under a doctor's authority, with the expectation that this doctor is administering care, truly understand that the placebo has no active ingredient? Placebos may have a place in modern medicine, but many questions need answering before they become standard treatment.

Tatarewicz  posted on  2011-12-23   1:33:05 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  

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