People with various kinds of cancer who turned down treatments like
chemotherapy or radiation in favor of alternative medicine were two
to six times more likely to die within six years, compared to people
who accepted medically proven therapies, researchers found.
"In our clinical practice, we started seeing patients coming in with
more advanced cancer . . . because they first tried alternative
therapies that failed," said lead author Dr. Skyler Johnson, of the
Yale School of Medicine and the Yale Cancer Center in New Haven,
Connecticut.
Many cancer patients add nonmedical therapies to the treatments
prescribed by their oncologists. But little is known about patients
who choose only unconventional methods to address their cancer,
Johnson and colleagues write in the Journal of the National Cancer
Institute, online August 10.

To find out more about this group of patients, they used information
collected on prostate, breast, lung and colon cancers for the U.S.
National Cancer Database between 2004 and 2013.
The researchers had data on 280 people who tried only unproven
methods administered by nonmedical personnel. They compared each of
these patients to two people with similar cancer type, disease
stage, age, race and other attributes, but who received conventional
treatments.
Half of the patients were followed for at least five and a half
years.
Compared to patients who chose evidence-based cancer treatments,
those who used unconventional methods tended to have high social and
economic status, be from northwestern U.S. states, have advanced
cancers and be in otherwise good health.
Overall, patients who chose unproven methods were more than twice as
likely to die during the follow-up period than those who received
treatments like chemotherapy, radiation and surgery.
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Compared to those receiving evidence-backed treatments, patients
with breast cancer who opted for unproven methods were more than
five times as likely to die, those with lung cancer were more than
twice as likely to die and those with colon cancer were about five
times as likely to die.
"Our findings highlight the importance of timely proven care for
cancer," Johnson told Reuters Health.
If the patients were followed for a longer period of time, it's
possible the differences could be greater, he said. Some prostate
and breast cancers develop slowly even if untreated and may not be
deadly within five to six years.
In addition, Johnson said, the researchers couldn't account for
people who received science-based treatments when their
unconventional methods failed.
He said people should be cautious about what treatment advice they
receive from the internet or through word of mouth.
"This is something they need to think a lot about, because choosing
alternative medicine for their cancer treatment could risk their
lives," Johnson said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2v3Gvii
J Natl Cancer Inst 2017.
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