What is your approach to cancer patients who inquire about alternative or complementary treatments?

It depends a little bit on what specifically they want to use, and if they are truly investigating alternative medicine or complementary medicine.

For people seeking full alternative medicine without any conventional treatment, I tell them that a research study showed that people who pursued the alt...

The domain of “complementary/alternative” medical treatments subsumes a very wide category of therapies that are at best beneficial (in being truly "complementary"), and at worst, actively harmful or deleterious. To complicate things further, the latter camp can further be divided into those treatme...

Drs. @Dr. First Last, @Dr. First Last, and @Dr. First Last have given fantastic answers on the best initial approaches to take (including referral to integrative oncology, if available), so I won't rehash them. For patients who, after lengthy discussion, still want to pursue non-standard or non-prov...

I had a young patient with breast cancer/brain mets. She worked in radiation oncology and was quite knowledgeable about both her disease and its treatment. Her family was strongly pressing for naturopathic alternative care.

We compromised. A center within a day's drive of our center had a "comprehen...

I’ve incorporated an integrative approach to the care of my oncology patients for the last 20 years. It’s the common sense use of conventional treatments, evidence-informed “complementary” therapies, risk and side effect mitigation, and lifestyle counseling. Our role is to help educate them on the m...

It has been about 20 years since I completed my fellowship training in integrative medicine through the University of Arizona program. A few things I have learned in the practice of integrative radiation oncology over that time:

• I discuss the fact that an integrative approach to cancer care include...

My general approach is to say that the treatments traditional medicine recommends are "proven" in some way to do something, whereas complementary medicines are not. That being said, I tell patients that I've got no problem with them trying whatever complementary medicines they wish in addition to th...

I don’t have all of the answers. It may be beneficial but probably not. I’m okay with it as long as they are getting the best conventional treatment and not hurting themselves. It's important for them to understand they might be investing resources without guaranteed returns.