Choices in Complementary Care

What is complementary cancer care?

What is complementary cancer care, exactly? It’s a set of medical approaches, practices, and therapies that are believed to promote healing, treat disease, and/or foster wellness, but that are outside the conventional medical culture of a place. Complementary cancer care is often further defined by what it is not:

• It’s not typically considered conventional medical care, the care you’ll receive from a doctor of the dominant medical culture where you live. Because conventional medical care varies from country to country, some approaches may be conventional in one place and complementary in another.¹Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine. World Health Organization. Viewed August 4, 2021. Complementary therapies can become conventional over time, too. Acupuncture was considered strictly a complementary therapy just a few decades ago, but it has become widely accepted in many conventional practices.
• Complementary practices are often not regulated by government agencies or boards, and complementary therapies typically don’t need a prescription.
• It is not typically covered by private or government insurance, although this is changing in some places.
• Complementary approaches and therapies are probably not taught in the dominant medical culture’s schools, although this is also changing.

What are complementary therapies?

Complementary therapies include a wide range of approaches. In the US and Canada, these approaches and practices are generally considered complementary:

• Natural products, herbs, nutrients, and supplements
• Specialized diets and metabolic therapies
• Exercise and movement therapies
• Mind-body, spiritual, and consciousness-changing approaches
• Biological treatments such as vaccines
• Repurposed drugs, novel timing of treatments, and other off-label, overlooked or novel cancer approaches, which we call “ONCAs” 
• Energy therapies
• Manipulative and body-based methods
• Therapies using heat, cold, sound, light or cutting-edge radiotherapy

Some therapies are ancient and still widely used in traditional medicine in China, India, and other places. Others may be quite new. Still others—such as repurposed drugs—have been used for decades in conventional medicine, but not primarily for cancer care. Some require a prescription, while others can be found in supermarkets or health food stores. Some involve taking a pill, while others involve a practice or activity.

How are complementary therapies used in cancer care?

One commonality is that none of these therapies has been shown to cure cancer on its own. These are generally supportive therapies that can bolster your body’s biological and chemical balance (terrain), address side effects, and reduce your risk of recurrence. Some can improve your response to conventional treatment. Thus, they complement conventional cancer care. 

Complementary therapies can make a big difference in your ability to complete conventional treatments, in your quality of life, in your experience of side effects and symptoms, and in your overall health and wellness. For people who have run out of conventional treatment options, some may even prolong life and stabilize disease for a time. But we do not offer them to you as cancer cures, for the evidence does not support this.

Research constraints in complementary cancer care

A lack of evidence is not the same as evidence that a therapy doesn’t provide any medical benefit. Because many complementary therapies aren’t likely to provide huge profits for manufacturers, less research money may be available. This limits the amount of research, and especially the size of research studies, on many therapies. Huge research studies lasting several years cost millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Complementary therapies often don’t have such funding.

More complex research, combining complementary therapies and self-care practices, is also not well funded. Some research shows that combinations of therapies may have synergistic impacts on cancer, but obtaining funding for studies with more than one or two variables is challenging. Highly controlled studies are prioritized, even at the expense of potentially better outcomes. 

Dr. Wayne Jonas advocates for the use of an “evidence house”, an alternative framework in which to analyze complementary therapies, and shares, “As most clinicians know, the reasons that patients recover from illness are complex and synergistic, and many cannot simply be isolated in controlled environments.”²Jonas WB. The evidence house: how to build an inclusive base for complementary medicine. Western Journal of Medicine. 2001 Aug;175(2):79-80. Jonas believes that randomized controlled trials play an important role in assessing therapies, but other factors such as clinician’s experience should also be incorporated. 

In whole person cancer care, mental and emotional healing may be as much a focus as physical healing. Healing can be through many means, including the use of mind-body therapies.

How can you find out if complementary therapies can help you?

Although many complementary therapies lack large studies solidly showing efficacy, quite a bit of published evidence of smaller studies can inform us if complementary therapies may provide medical benefits. We share these studies in our therapy reviews. We also report when no evidence shows that a therapy is effective.

We’ve reviewed dozens of complementary therapies with you in mind. We began with therapies that our advisors told us they use with the most common types of cancer. We have expanded—and continue to add—more therapies across the spectrum of complementary care. We don’t shy away from more controversial therapies.

If a therapy hasn’t been studied rigorously, another factor to consider is medical experience over decades or even hundreds of years showing good effects and safety. For this reason, we include information about expert use of therapies in all our reviews.

If a therapy shows some evidence of effectiveness, and it likely promotes health and does not have harmful side effects, and you are drawn to trying it, we underscore Donald Abrams, MD’s point: “The lower the likelihood of harm, the lower the burden of proof.”

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Exploring complementary therapies

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