CancerChoices Year-end Reflections—2023

Dear CancerChoices Friends—

This is our year-end report to you. You are here because you or someone you care about or love has cancer. Or you are a healthcare professional. You want the best for yourself or for the person you care for. The fact is that you won’t get the best either from conventional therapies alone or from self-care and complementary therapies alone.

The only way to get the best for yourself or someone you care about is to integrate the best of conventional therapies, self-care and complementary therapies. But that’s not easy to do.  That’s why we founded CancerChoices. We strive to be the best resource available on integrative cancer therapies.

Our goal is simple

We want to help you or someone you care for to live as well as possible for as long as possible. The way we do all of this is to help you or someone you care for understand both the strengths and weaknesses of all three modalities—conventionalthe cancer care offered by conventionally trained physicians and most hospitals; examples are chemotherapy, surgery, and radiotherapy, self-carelifestyle actions and behaviors that may impact cancer outcomes; examples include eating health-promoting foods, limiting alcohol, increasing physical activity, and managing stress and complementaryin cancer care, complementary care involves the use of therapies intended to enhance or add to standard conventional treatments; examples include supplements, mind-body approaches such as yoga or psychosocial therapy, and acupuncture approaches. 

Conventional treatments are critical in cancer care but making decisions about the many choices among conventional therapies requires skill and guidance. Just as choices in conventional therapies require skill, so do choices in self-care and complementary therapies. We specialize in summarizing the evidence of self care and complementary therapies to show when they improve survival, reduce risk of recurrence, reduce side effects and symptoms, and more. 

Through our practical, comprehensive offerings—our complementary therapy reviews, 7 Healing Practices, guidance on body terrain factors, side effect management and writings on healing— CancerChoices can help you or someone you care for assess therapies and practices that integrate a whole person approach—including finding healthcare professionals to support you. 

We have put over 25,000 hours into making CancerChoices what we and many others regard as the best digital patient-centered resource on integrative cancer care. Our reviews of complementary therapies have been rated higher than any other similar resource by oncology professionals, rated 4.9/5 for quality and trustworthiness of information. 

We are just getting started 

Our research team, led by Nancy Hepp, continues to develop and publish additional resources to help people with cancer and their caregivers make the most informed decisions in their care. Upcoming complementary therapy reviews include Intravenous Vitamin C, Hyperthermia, Mebendazole & Fenbendazole, and Statins. 

CancerChoices also serves as a vital and trustworthy resource for healthcare professionals who want to become more informed in integrative cancer care or who want more trustworthy resources to share with their patients. Our clinical oncology team, led by Laura Pole, RN, MSN, OCNS, is educating oncology professionals—particularly nurses—to expand their knowledge of evidence-based integrative approaches. 

We thank you for being a part of our community

As a program of the nonprofit Commonweal, we are driven by the same sense of purpose that drives the Commonweal Cancer Help Program week-long retreats, the on-line Sanctuary retreats, the in-person retreats for young breast cancer survivors, Healing Circles Global’s weekly virtual and in-person circles and all the work the Collaborative for Health & Environment has done on environmental contributors to cancer.

We care deeply about your well-being. We provide all of our resources free of cost because we believe financial barriers should not get in the way of access to reliable information on cancer care. When you share our resources including our newsletters and Facebook or Twitter posts, you contribute to sharing sources of hope. If you are considering financial support towards our mission, know that every donation matters. 

We’d love to hear from you about your priorities and interests or ways in which you’d like to engage with CancerChoices. Contact us.

With healing wishes this holiday season, 

Michael Lerner and Miki Scheidel