I'm looking for morbity/mortality information or data on women
diagnosed with breast cancer who have NOT done chemo or radiation.   -
Women who have chosen non-traditional methods of treating their breast
cancer. Is there any data on their survival rates compared to
traditional treatment?

---

Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 14 Oct 2003 16:39 PDT

Hello gardnervillian-ga,

As my colleague, kriswrite-ga, noted below, statistics like those you
requested are "hard to come by".

The number of formal studies on alternative cancer treatments probably
only numbers in the thousands, and only a few hundred of these studies
have a focus on breast cancer.  There is A LOT of information in these
studies about who seeks alternative treatments and why, and on the
effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of various alternative therapies.

Just to give you an idea, here are a few of the therapies covered (to
a greater or lesser degree) in the scientific literature of
alternative cancer therapies:


Antineoplastons 
Cartilage 
Coenzyme Q10 
Essiac 
Garlic 
Gerson Therapy 
Hydrazine Sulfate
Immuno-augmentative Therapy 
Laetrile/Amygdalin 
Mistletoe/Iscador 
Naltrexone 
Select Vegetables
Tea
Vitamins 


HOWEVER, very few -- if any -- of these studies focus on patients who
have opted solely for non-traditional approaches, and have rejected
use of chemo or radiation.

There are compelling reasons this phenomenon has not been studied in
depth.

First of all, there are very few patients that actually fall into that
category -- most who try alternative therapies also are involved in
conventional therapies as well.  Secondly, the people who commit to
100% alternative therapy may have decided to avoid the conventional
medical community all together, making them unlikely participants in
formalized medical studies.

[There is one exception to this.  Many women in third world countries
avoid -- or do not have -- access to conventional medicines, and turn
first to alternative therapies.  This group HAS been studied, and the
biggest impact of their reliance on alternative therapies is that the
delay in seeking conventional medical treatment seriously worsens
their prognosis].


I'd be glad to summarize the key research findings regarding
alternative therapies and breast cancer, if that would meet your needs
as an answer to your question.  If not, please let us know how you
would like us to proceed, given the paucity of the type of
morbidity/mortality you're seeking.

Thank you.

pafalafa-ga

This article may interest you (and show why statistics about
alternative treatments are so hard to come by):

http://www.what-is-cancer.com/papers/Unproven.html

Kriswrite

Dear pafalafa-ga

Any data you can provide me would be helpful.  I am a radiology
administrator who has 20+ years experience dealing with conventional
breast cancer diagnosis and treatments.   I have a dear friend who is
a naturalist, has been diagnosed with breast ca, and is refusing any
conventional treatment, sooooo I'm trying to find any data to show her
that perhaps its not the best choice.   If you can identify data on
the third world women, and as you suggested and summerize key research
findings it would be wonderful.
Thank you so much.

Such data are not only unavailable (no one would do a study using
accepted scientific methodology, in which a group were randomized into
no treatment), but would need to be meaningfully stratified to be
understood: what kind of cancer, what stage, what was done to diagnose
it in the first place, etc. If your friend has had the entire tumor
removed, then, depending on many factors unknown to us (invasive,
margins, size, etc) there is some chance of cure by simple removal
alone. Meaning that unconventional treatment (ie no treatment) would
have some chance of cure. For example, with complete lumpectomy, if
the breast is not radiated there's around a 40% chance of local
recurrance (higher, depending on these unknown factors), so that if
she takes snake oil, there's a 60% chance of no local recurrance. As
compared to 10% chance of local recurrance with proper treatment. This
says nothing about "cure," however, because that depends also on
distant spread. Our local paper ran a 3 day spread on a woman who'd
had conventional treatment of one breast cancer years earlier, cured.
When she had another cancer in the opposite breast she opted for
"unconventional" treatment. The paper implicitly lauded her resolute
nature. Her obit was buried deep in the paper, around a year later.