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'Alternative Medicine' for Cancer Ups Death Risk
It's rare but it happens: a patient with a curable cancer rejects conventional medicine and initially chooses to receive only alternative treatments.
Now researchers from the Yale Cancer Center in New Haven, Connecticut, find that this choice is associated with a 2.5-fold higher risk for death compared with conventional cancer treatment (CCT)
The team had to comb through 10 years (2004-2013) of records in the National Cancer Database to find 280 early-stage cancer patients (with either breast, prostate, lung, or colorectal disease) whose treatment was coded as "other-unproven: cancer treatment administered by non-medical personnel."
This alternative medicine-only group was then matched to 560 patients with the same types of cancer who received CCT, such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy, surgery, and hormone therapy.
Source: Medscape