Cancer treatment is often a difficult process, thanks in no small part to the many side effects it can cause. A study out this week, however, shows the perils of relying on less conventional remedies instead.
Researchers at Yale University examined the outcomes of more than two million women with breast cancer. Women who used complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) had a substantially greater risk of dying over a five year span compared to women taking traditional treatment, they found—even if they used both at the same time. On the positive side, though, most patients stuck with mainstream medicine.
“The breast cancer patients who chose to forgo traditional treatments in favor of CAM appeared to have lower survival rates,” study author Daniel Boffa, a professor of thoracic surgery and cancer specialist at Yale School of Medicine, told Gizmodo.
A risky gamble
There are many different forms of alternative medicine, some less risky than others (mediation, for instance) Yet other treatments aren’t so benign and can come with serious, even potentially fatal, side effects, such as the improper use of chelation therapy. And even the simple act of delaying or avoiding conventional care in favor of ineffective alternative remedies can prove dangerous.
A 2018 study found that cancer patients who reported only using alternative medicine had a greater mortality rate than people on mainstream cancer treatments. The current researchers wanted to specifically examine CAM use among breast cancer patients, though, using more updated information. So they analyzed data from the National Cancer Database on women in the U.S. diagnosed with breast cancer between 2011 and 2021.
All told, 97.6% of women reported only using traditional treatment; 2.3% of women reported using no treatment at all; and less than 0.1% reported using CAM alone or CAM plus traditional treatment.
Unsurprisingly, compared to traditional treatment, women who abstained from any treatment fared worse—but those on CAM didn’t do much better. After adjusting for other factors, CAM-only users had a more than threefold higher risk of dying in the five years after diagnosis than traditional patients.
Even women who used CAM plus traditional treatment were still 45% more likely to die overall than women who only relied on traditional treatment. This greater risk was seen with most treatments across all four stages of cancer. One possible reason for this disparity might be that combination users were also more likely to forgo certain standard treatments for breast cancer, such as radiation and endocrine therapy.
The team’s findings were published Monday in JAMA Network Open.
What to do about CAM use for cancer?
There are still some lingering questions about how alterative medicine is used for treating cancer, Boffa and his team note.
“The proportion of patients documented to have had CAM is a bit lower than we expected, raising the possibility that patients are not including their plans to use CAM in discussions with their treatment teams,” he said. That’s concerning since people’s reluctance to discuss their use of alternative medicine with doctors can add to its risk, given that some treatments could interact badly with traditional medications.
“It would be important to understand the full range of outcomes in patients who take CAM in combination with all recommended treatments, perhaps identifying specific scenarios where CAM is potentially helpful or harmful,” Boffa added.
People should be free to decide what’s best for their own care, of course. But conventional treatments have greatly improved over the past few decades, allowing people with cancer to live longer than ever before. And most of the time, there’s no reason to think that alternative remedies will turn out better than the standard, especially for serious conditions like cancer.
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