1. Use a Whole Person Approach
People with cancer do best when conventional treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, or immunotherapy are combined with healthy lifestyle practices and complementary therapies such as acupuncture and supplements.
After delving into the research on complementary and alternative therapies for many years, it’s clear there is no “magic pill.” A whole-person approach will help you navigate cancer treatments with fewer side effects and better well-being, may help your conventional treatments work better, and will improve your health and resilience after treatment. In other words, it will help you live better and longer with and beyond cancer.
2. Explore What Matters to You
What matters to you, as well as your goals and intuition, should shape your treatment decisions, including what treatments to pursue and, in some instances, when to stop treatment. Having conversations with your clinicians and loved ones helps you shape a care plan that feels both effective and authentic to you. Beyond treatment, exploring what matters can help you tap into core questions such as “What do you wish to prioritize at this stage in life?”
3. Make Thoughtful Treatment Decisions
Choosing the best conventional medical treatment is one of the most important decisions you’ll make, as it has the most potential for impacting your cancer and your quality of life. Cancer care continues to advance rapidly. Take time to learn about your options, fully understand the expected results and potential side effects of treatment, and get second opinions, especially for cancers that are harder to treat or are uncommon. Careful choices aligned with your priorities can improve outcomes and reduce side effects.
→ Making Skillful Treatment Decisions
4. Use the Support Your Cancer Center Offers
Ask about available support services within your clinic. Social workers, dietitians, therapists, and patient navigators can help you manage symptoms, coordinate care, and find emotional and practical support throughout treatment. The palliative care team can also help mitigate the side effects of treatment. Integrative Oncology services are now in every major cancer institution in the US, though what is offered at each center may vary.
→ Palliative Care in Cancer
→ Advocates and Navigators
5. Make Healthy Living a Core Part of Your Care
Lifestyle practices such as eating well, moving more, and managing stress are powerful parts of cancer care. Although basic, these practices have far more evidence on quality of life and survival benefits than most other complementary therapies.
Regular exercise and a balanced diet improve treatment tolerance and even survival.
Managing stress and improving sleep helps restore energy and strengthen your immune system.
The trick is to incorporate these practices in ways that feel healing, supportive, and nourishing to you.
6. Prioritize Side-Effect Management
Managing side effects isn’t just about feeling better. It helps you stay on track with treatment, which can improve survival. Many complementary therapies and lifestyle practices are effective in easing fatigue, nausea, pain, and anxiety.
7. Use Complementary Therapies Safely
Complementary therapies, such as acupuncture, massage, yoga, and meditation, are lower-risk when used alongside conventional cancer treatments to support healing and improve well-being. It is also important to work with your healthcare team before starting a new therapy to ensure it is safe for you.
Other therapies, including supplements and repurposed drugs, can sometimes interact with cancer treatments and cause side effects, and should be used only under the guidance of qualified practitioners.
The evidence for complementary therapies varies by both therapy type and cancer type. Depending on the therapy, benefits may include:
- Making treatments like chemotherapy or radiation more effective
- Reducing specific side effects such as fatigue or nausea
- Improving body terrain factors, such as inflammation and immune balance
- Lowering the risk of recurrence
→ Supplement and Therapies Database
8. Manage Chronic Health Issues
Insulin resistance, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity all have impacts on your health and therefore your body’s resistance to and resilience during and beyond cancer. Effectively managing these other health issues is an important part of your cancer care.
9. Support Your Body’s Internal Systems
Keeping your body’s internal systems, or body terrain, healthy both during and after treatment can make a difference. Work with your care team to reduce inflammation, support your immune system, maintain a healthy microbiome, and more.
→ Optimizing Your Body Terrain
10. Work with a Qualified Practitioner
When incorporating complementary therapies, work with a qualified practitioner who understands cancer care and has expertise in these therapies. Most oncologists are experts in cancer treatments, but often have limited exposure to complementary therapies. Integrative oncologists and FABNO-certified naturopathic oncologists have expertise in both cancer and complementary therapies. Specialists in traditional medicine such as Traditional Chinese Medicine or Ayurveda can offer additional whole-person knowledge to those who are seeking to balance their health.
→ Finding Integrative Oncologists and Other Practitioners
11. Consider Finances
Cancer care is expensive. Adding complementary therapies, which are often not covered by insurance, can substantially increase treatment costs. If limited finances are a concern for you, assessing the risk-benefit becomes even more critical. Thankfully, the therapies with the highest evidence are often the most affordable, including: Moving More, Eating Well, Sleeping Well, Managing Stress, basic supplements like Omega 3s and Vitamin D, meditation and yoga, a walk in the park, and doing what brings you joy and healing.
→ Affordability and Access to Care
12. Be Cautious with Online “Cure” Stories
Social media can be full of hopeful stories about unproven treatments. It’s natural to want to believe them, but most lack real research. Focus instead on therapies with credible evidence, and discuss new ideas with a knowledgeable clinician before trying them.
Many of the “cures” are based on either anecdotal or preclinical, rather than clinical, studies.
- Human (clinical) studies give the most useful evidence.
- Animal or lab (preclinical) studies are early steps in the research process and often fail when applied to humans. Be cautious about relying on animal and lab studies alone.
- Anecdotes are reports from individuals and do not have rigorous evidence to support the claim.
13. Assess Benefits and Risks
With a cancer that is curable with conventional treatments, focus on radical health promotion and reducing side effects of treatments both during and after treatment, to minimize the impact of treatment in the near and longer term. Pursuing unproven therapies with higher risks is not advisable for curable cancers or chronic or slow-growing cancers that can be managed well with conventional treatments.
With advanced and hard-to-treat cancers, the risk-benefit ratio shifts, and it may make sense to explore emerging treatments, including clinical trials. If you choose this path, do so with expert guidance and careful consideration.
While there’s no evidence that complementary therapies alone can cure cancer, some people who take a comprehensive, whole-person approach under expert guidance experience unexpectedly longer survival.
→ When Conventional Treatments Are Not an Option
14. Seek Meaning and Healing
A cancer diagnosis can touch every part of life, including your body, emotions, mind, and spirit. Exploring healing, forgiveness, and meaning can bring peace and purpose, no matter the outcome. Many people describe this inner work as one of the most important parts of their cancer journey.
Healing is more than eradicating disease. It can mean finding peace, connection, and purpose, even in the midst of uncertainty. This broader view of healing allows everyone to pursue wholeness, regardless of the disease outcome.
→ Healing
15. Draw Strength from Connection and Community
Healing doesn’t happen in isolation. Connecting with peers, loved ones, and healing communities can help reduce distress, strengthen resilience, and provide support throughout every stage of your cancer experience.
Three additional points on which to reflect, from CancerChoices Founder, Michael Lerner:
First, some people do achieve lasting complete remissions even from advanced cancer using an integrative approach. This is well documented by our colleague Kelly Turner in her books and ongoing Radical Remission Project.
Second, cancer survival curves show that many patients live far longer than the median survival. Complementary therapies, lifestyle practices and inner healing work are often prominent in longer-term survival. Radical remissions are simply the endpoint of the extended survival curves.
Third, while radical remissions are rare, life beyond median survival isn’t rare at all. By definition, half of all cancer patients survive beyond the median survival point. It makes perfect sense that people who choose their conventional and complementary therapies with care and who engage strongly with self care are likely to live better and longer than those who don’t. Many people live far longer and far better lives than their physicians expected.