Complementary cancer treatments putting patients at risk of death

Complementary and alternative therapies are a major part of treatment for some people going through cancer, but alarming new research has found those who turn to complementary medicine are more likely to die.

The therapies, which include traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy and specialised diets, are intended to be used alongside conventional treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation. Research outlined in the JAMA Oncology Journal has found many people are replacing these conventional treatments with alternatives, which is what is causing so many of these patients to die.

“What it really showed is that people who use complementary medicines, and it was a minority of people, had poorer cancer survival and the reason for that poorer cancer survival in that group was abandonment of what’s known as adjuvant treatment,” Cancer Council CEO Professor Sanchia Aranda told Starts at 60. “So it’s really people not following through with clinical recommendations for the best way of improving their survival and seeing complementary medicines as actually an alternate.”

In the study, researchers from Yale University analysed more than 1,000 breast, prostate, bowel and lung cancer patients in the US and found all patients underwent a minimum of one conventional therapy. The 258 patients who used complementary regimes in conjunction with some form of conventional therapy had a higher risk of dying from the disease. In fact, use of complementary medicine was linked with an 82.2 per cent five-year survival rate compared with the 86.6 per cent rate for people who didn’t use them. 

The study also concluded that after age, sex, income and educational level were taken into consideration, people using the complementary treatments were twice as likely to die as a result of the disease. Researchers noted patients using alternatives were more likely to refuse potentially lifesaving conventional treatment, while Aranda said health professionals were partly to blame.

“Part of the reason for that is health professionals are not adopting an accepting enough attitude of peoples’ desire to do things that help themselves and that probably means that people aren’t getting the right sort of information about that,” Aranda said. “The study will be really helpful in motivating health professionals to have a more open discussion and particularly to be able to say to patients, ‘Look, if you do that and abandon this, you’re more likely to die from the cancer’.”

Having said that, researchers said those using complementary treatments were more likely to have later stages of cancer. These patients were also more likely to be younger, female, better educated and more well-off.

The results contradict previous studies and research surrounding the use of alternative medicines to treat cancer. A 2016 study by the University of Adelaide published in the Oncotarget Journal found traditional Chinese medicine, composing of a complex mix of plant compounds, killed cancer cells.

“We showed that the patterns of gene expression triggered by compound kushen injection (CKI) affect the same pathways as western chemotherapy but by acting on different genes in the same pathways,” researchers said at the time. “These genes regulate the cell cycle of division and death, and it seems that CKI alters the way the cell cycle is regulated to push cancer cells down the cell death pathway, therefore killing the cells.”

Still, the Cancer Council’s position is that complementary therapies alone aren’t enough to beat cancer, although they may be effective in managing anxiety, helping with mouth ulcers and increasing appetite.

“They don’t work as anti-cancer treatments,” Aranda said. “It’s really important before embarking on any course of complementary therapy that you do talk about it with your doctor, so considerations can be made.”

What do you think? Have you or someone you loved ever been through cancer? Did you use alternative medicines?