Alternative Medicine For Cancer: What's The Difference?
Despite huge investments in cancer research and treatment, spanning many decades, the outlook for most patients diagnosed with cancer remains bleak: there haven't advanced much in the fight against cancer, a generation on, and there is no long-lasting cure for the disease. Increasingly, cancer patients turn into alternative medicines to look for therapies. Over 50% of patients diagnosed with cancer use one or more alternative medicines in their treatment regimen. But can alternative medicine really provide the answers where drugs, surgery, antibiotics, and radiation have failed?
Clinical Nutrition
Many of the alternative medicine treatments for cancer fall within the field of clinical nutrition. The thinking behind clinical treatment is that changing one's diet detoxifies the body and helps the body heal itself from degenerative diseases and cancer. Nutritional regimen are based on a fiber-rich, low-fat and largely vegetarian diet reinforced by micronutrient supplements of freshly prepared organic juices.
Metabolic Typing
Metabolic typing is clinical nutrition with a difference: metabolic type. Diets or nutritional supplements need to be prescribed while taking into account each person's unique biochemistry - the so-called metabolic type. In order to prescribe a treatment, a cancer patient's metabolic type is first assessed through a set of elaborate questionnaires and tests. The results are then evaluated and a personalized diet and nutritional supplements are prescribed to the patient to detoxify the body and achieve the ideal metabolic balance.
Laetrile Therapy
Alternative medicine has always been a proponent in the use of nutritional supplements, and there is no surprise that this approach has also made inroads into the treatment of cancer.
Laetrile therapy has traditionally used vitamin B-17, a nutritional substance derived from plants and seeds, to treat people with cancer. Modern applications of Laetrile therapy in alternative clinics has now expanded to include other supplements, dietary requirements, digestive enzymes and detoxification as well as patient support therapy and spiritual counseling.
The Hoxsey Therapy
This therapy pays a great attention to the use of herbal chemotherapy that has a long history of therapeutic characteristics related to external cancer, such as malignant melanoma. Treatment consists of medicine composed of herbal-based powders and salves that are directly used on the external cancer. Once again, complementary therapies and psychological support are included in the treatment to round out a holistic program for the patient.
Despite the increasing popularity in the use of these therapies to treat cancer, you need to be aware that the effectiveness of many of these treatments lacks rigorous scientific evidence. To complicate matters further, side-effects can be very difficult to gauge over the long run since most of the clinical trials conducted thus far only last for two to four weeks. As a result, one can conclude that, based on the available evidence, alternative medicines could be viewed as effective symptomatic treatments for mild to moderate depression, no the serious or extreme cases.