This essay and the information that follows on this important issue and a number of other CANCER RELATED ISSUES ARE INTENDED ONLY FOR YOU TO RESEARCH FURTHER AND TO DISCUSS WITH YOUR DOCTOR.   (Please note that this site and all the links are intended for education purposes only to help the patient select and work with their doctor.)      

  Note that the use of nutrients which have been shown by science to be compatible with, safe, and beneficial to medical therapies are not considered by this essay to be alternatives bur rather proven adjuncts.

            COMMENTS ON EVALUATING ALTERNATIVE THERAPIES:

 It is generally not recommended that alternative therapies be used in fighting cancer.  The science, if any, is inherently less with alternative therapies as compared to medical therapies and studied nutritional adjuncts.  This means that there is inherently a greater uncertainty and more risk associated with the use of any adjunct which has not been tested and proven to have substantial efficacy.  Almost always, there will be better options which use nutrition control proven by science.

 This is not to say that alternative therapies cannot at times be beneficial.  It is just that almost by definition, the science is not there is a sufficient amount to prove a significant benefit.  It is also not known what side effects and possibly dangerous side effects might exist.

 Certainly, on the other hand, there is not sufficient scientific knowledge of all aspects of clinical cancer to look at many alternative therapies and to say that such therapies cannot work for some scientific reason.  Because, however, something is not sufficiently understood to be able to say it won’t work, that is not justification to try the alternative if any proven therapy is still available to try.  Certainly, there are almost always additional proven anticancer nutrients to try which will have a higher probability of working than many and probably most non-nutrient possibly alternative therapies.

 One can easily be misled by anecdotal stories which seem to indicate that some person was cured as a result of some alternative therapy.  Anecdotal stories about someone being cured by some alternative therapy inherently cannot be proven to have occurred by that alternative therapy.  Spontaneous remissions without alternative therapies are a medical fact and occur about 87% of the time associated with a change in diet.  Again, however, the cure cannot be proven to occur because of the diet change.  There is always the possibility that some low grade infection stimulated the immune system to become more responsive and there is also the possibility of a delayed response to medical therapy which is possible especially if the patient’s life style is improved in ways which have anticancer consequences.

 There are one main ways in which an alternative therapy could be shown to work to some degree.  The main way would be for the source to provide a list of patients treated and giving as a minimum the number who were somehow cured and also giving the number of patients who were not cured.  This information is rarely if ever given and therefore, the simple statement that a certain number of patients were cured does not give any idea of the true probability of a cure which could be very low.  Commercial links are a bad sign on a site as is a lack on science links for verification of claims.

 Certainly, before any patient enters the poorly controlled arena of alternative therapies, all medical options and especially those options using nutrition control and proven nutrient elements even by themselves should be completely exhausted.

  Cancer Sci Reporter