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CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, Vol 38, 176-186, Copyright © 1988 by American Cancer Society

Unorthodox Cancer Medicine

¹ Director of Psychosocial Programs at the University of Pennsylvania Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
² Director of Community Applications, Division of Cancer Control, at the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, at the University of California, Los Angeles, in Los Angeles, California.

Contemporary unorthodox therapies appear to be unprecedented in their scope and specifics. They are not. We are experiencing a revival of 19th century natural, holistic, every-man-his-own-doctor medicine. Today this takes the form of metabolic cancer therapy, the most commonly sought alternative of the mid-1980s.

Now, as then, a substantial segment of patients and the healthy population have rejected what they perceive to be a disease-oriented, technologic, authoritarian health care system. Up to 50 percent of cancer patients today consider or use unorthodox treatments. Health professionals must understand the fear experienced by patients and families: fear of death and physical or mental incapacity. Patients need to believe, especially when physical deterioration approaches, that they will not be abandoned. They need to know that the health team is credible, acting from a proven knowledge base, and doing all that can be done. Patients and families must be helped to understand that, although cancer is not universally curable, it is always treatable. This takes time, and time and support must be given to explain all that the patient and family want to know—to explain the next steps of care; to discuss expectations; to establish credence and belief in what the health care team has to offer; and to display (not just feel) understanding, interest, and concern.

Typically, unproven alternatives are embedded in an ideology that patients find compelling and logical. This ideology includes an emphasis on self-care, a systemic rather than a localized view of pathology and of health, and belief in the fundamental importance of nutrition and whole-body fitness.

To the extent that patients reject conventional care as they are drawn to unproven alternatives, conventional medicine can and should respond by incorporating the reasonable components of unorthodox therapy that patients find lacking within the traditional health-care framework.

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