July 23, 2018.
According to a study conducted by a team of researchers and doctors from the faculty of medicine attached to Yale University in the United States, the use of alternative medicines decreases the chances of survival in case of cancer.
Decreased chances of survival
Alternative medicines such as acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy, fasting ” therapeutic »Or Chinese medicine, are meeting more and more success. If these medicines make it possible to regulate a certain number of ailments, they should not be used in case of serious illnesses, such as cancer. In any case, this is what American researchers recommend in a study published in the scientific journal. JAMA Oncology.
According to these studies, using alternative medicine significantly reduces the chances of survival of cancer patients. To reach this conclusion, the researchers followed 1,290 patients with one of the four most common cancers: breast, prostate, lung and colorectal cancer. These cancers were diagnosed at an early stage, without metastases.
Distrust of conventional treatments
Of these patients, 258 resorted to alternative therapies in addition to conventional treatment. By conventional treatment, we must understand chemotherapy, surgery, radiotherapy or hormone therapy. The researchers were thus able to observe that people in this group had 82.2% survivors after 5 years, against 86.6% for those who had received only conventional care.
But how to explain it? It seems that patients trusted alternative medicine more. In the first group, 34% of participants refused chemotherapy against 3.2% in the second; 53% refused radiotherapy against 2.3% in the other group; and 7% refused surgery. Clearly, alternative medicines are not responsible for the death of patients but they can give the impression that conventional treatments are unnecessary, which is very dangerous.
Marine Rondot
Read also: Alternative medicine: a placebo effect?
