Complementary Treatments

If you are going to consider complementary therapies for malignant mesothelioma, it may not be wise to do it at the exclusion of conventional cancer treatment. That is the message from a new study of nearly 2 million cancer patients published in JAMA Oncology. The study included patients with breast, prostate, lung, or colorectal cancer who were diagnosed between 2004 and 2013 at 1,500 Commission on Cancer-accredited centers across the US. Researchers found that the 258 patients who chose to use complementary medicine for their condition had a higher risk of death than those who didn’t. But the reason may have less to do with the complementary therapies themselves than the fact that many of these same patients also refused…