Cancer treatments
2017-08-14 22:04:00.807955+02 by
Dan Lyke
1 comments
Choosing
alternative cancer treatment doubles your risk of death:
The team then compared the health outcomes of these [281] people with 560 others
who were similar to them in terms of age, race and disease, but instead underwent
conventional treatment.
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.
The study is Use of Alternative Medicine for Cancer and Its Impact on
Survival Skyler B. Johnson Henry S. Park Cary P. Gross James B. Yu.
https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djx145
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#Comment Re: Cancer treatments made: 2017-12-21 19:29:43.136186+01 by:
Dan Lyke
Same study, different write-up: Cancer.gov: Forgoing Conventional Cancer Treatments for Alternative Medicine Increases Risk of Death
To conduct their analysis, the researchers matched each of the patients who had used alternative therapies with two similar patients who had received conventional treatments—surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or hormone therapy—during the same time period.
In addition to finding that patients with breast or colorectal cancer were about five times more likely to die over the following 5 years if they had used alternative therapies, the researchers found that patients with nonmetastatic lung cancer who used alternative therapies were more than twice as likely to die as patients who underwent conventional treatment.
By contrast, men with nonmetastatic prostate cancer who used alternative therapies did not have reduced survival over the follow-up period. This finding highlights the growing understanding that many men with early-stage prostate cancer can live a long time with only active surveillance of their disease instead of immediate treatment, explained Dr. Johnson.