Cancer patients who shun chemo for alternative therapies ‘are TWICE as likely to die’
CANCER patients who opt for alternative therapies over chemotherapy are twice as likely to die, experts have warned.
That's what a team of experts from Yale School of Medicine in the US discovered after comparing treatment success rates for more than 700 cancer patients.
The team combed through 10 years of records in the National Cancer Database to find 280 early stage cancer patients.
They were all diagnosed with either breast cancer, prostate or lung cancer or colorectal forms of the disease and opted for alternative treatments.
They included homeopathy, special diets and crystal healing.
The researchers then compared the group to 560 patients with the same type of cancer that chose conventional cancer treatment such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone therapy.
Patients were followed for about five years.
Based on their comparisons, alternative treatments were associated with a near six-fold increased risk of death for breast cancer patients, more than fourfold increased risk or colorectal cancer patients and a twofold increased risk of death in lung cancer patients.
On average that means cancer patients who chose alternative therapies are 2.5 times more likely to die.
Alternative medicine was also associated with a significantly worse five-year survival rate with all cancers compared to conventional treatment.
Only 58 per cent of those with breast cancer survived the next five years, 20 per cent of lung cancer patients survived and 32 per cent of colorectal or bowel cancer patients.
The only group that alternative medicine did not raise the risk of death in was those with prostate cancer.
Lead author Skyler Johnson said: "This is not unexpected, given the long natural history of prostate cancer and the short median follow-up in this study."
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The reason some people on alternative treatments survive is probably because they eventually seek out conventional treatments, Johnson told
These treatments were not recorded in the data base.
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John Bridgewater, an oncologist at University College London Hospital, said he was unsurprising by the results.
He said: "Many patients will often go on special diets, rather than having conventional treatment.
"But we have no evidence that anyone benefits from these diets, apart from those that collect the fees."
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