About Alternative Cancer Treatment Centers

People who were unfortunate enough to be diagnosed with cancer in the United States used to have only the conventional cancer medical treatments of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery at their disposal. Today, there are alternative cancer treatment centers around the country that offer natural and spiritual approaches to fighting cancer with or without the use of conventional cancer treatment methods.

Significance

• According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, cancer is the second leading death cause in the United States. Although this information is alarming, the National Cancer Institute's statistics have declared that there are currently around 11 million cancer survivors. According to New Hope Medical Center, the rate of cancer has been declining since the early 1990s and it is their opinion that this decline may be a result of many cancer patients choosing a proactive approach to their cancer treatment options. Alternative cancer treatment centers, like the New Hope Medical Center, aim to provide cancer patients with a wide array of choices that treat their diseases individually using alternative cancer treatments alone or along with conventional treatments that may extend the patient's life expectancy while also improving the quality of their lives.

Types

• Alternative cancer treatment centers may offer individualized naturopathic medicine, mind-body medicine, nutritional support, non-denominational spiritual support, massage therapy, meditation, acupressure, acupuncture and counseling support to its patients. Some alternative cancer treatment centers, like the Oasis of Hope, may use more progressive approaches like ozonated stem cell therapy, which sends stem cells to the affected areas to advance the healing processes.

Function

• Alternative cancer treatment centers aim to treat the whole person, not just the manifested cancer. According to the New Hope Medical Center, chemotherapy in high doses can devastate the immune system and lead to debilitating fatigue, pneumonia and even death. The function of alternative cancer treatment centers is to allow the cancer patient to choose different alternative cancer treatments that will build up their body's own abilities to fight the cancer itself.

Potential

• According to the Oasis of Hope alternative cancer treatment center, their integrative regulatory therapy, or IRT-Q, approach has yielded better survival rates than were recognized by the National Cancer Institute's 2007 SEER Survival Monograph. For example, the Oasis IRT-Q three-year breast cancer survivor rate was 75 percent as compared to the 32 percent conventional treatment survival rate.

Considerations

• According to the Oasis of Hope alternative cancer treatment center, many people with stage IV cancer are not able to be helped by the conventional medical community and are told that there are no further treatments to help fight their cancers. However, Oasis states that its center uses a variety of different integrative treatments that can make the cancer more receptive to chemotherapy, use different forms of chemotherapy, hinder the cancer's progress and attend to the spiritual and psychological needs of the patient that were neglected by past cancer physicians.