Choosing alternative cancer treatment doubles the risk of death: New Research

Skyler Johnson and his colleagues at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut have recently found that people who choose alternative medicine over conventional treatment for their cancer are more likely to die from the disease.

They looked at treatment and survival records from the US National Cancer Database and identified 281 people with breast, prostate, lung and colorectal cancer who had opted for unproven treatments, shunning conventional approaches such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery.

Johnson doesn’t know what alternative treatments these people took, but has seen many of his own patients opt for a wide range of therapies. "They could be herbs, botanicals, homeopathy, special diets or energy crystals, which are basically just stones that people believe have healing powers," he says.

Health outcomes of these people with 560 others who were similar to them in terms of age, race and disease, but instead underwent conventional treatment were compared.

They found that people who took alternative medicine were two and half times more likely to die within five years of diagnosis. This is a low estimate, says Johnson, skewed by the fact that prostate cancer, for example, takes longer than that to develop into a life-threatening disease.

Among those with breast cancer, people taking alternative remedies were 5.68 times more likely to die within five years. While 41 per cent of those receiving conventional treatment for lung cancer survived for at least five years, only 20 per cent of those who opted out of such treatment did. And only 33 per cent of people using alternative medicine for colorectal cancer survived the next five years, compared to 79 per cent of those on conventional treatments.

Johnson said, "The reason some people on alternative treatments survive is probably because many eventually seek out conventional treatment, often once their disease has progressed."

"The people in the analysis who opted for alternative treatments generally tended to be wealthier and better educated. In the US, medical insurance doesn’t cover unproven treatments, so only richer people can afford the most expensive treatments. Herbs and diets don’t sound expensive, but when these things are delivered through providers, they can come with a hefty bill. It’s a multibillion dollar industry. People pay more out-of-pocket for alternative treatments than they do for standard treatments."