For people battling prostate cancer, the fight can feel like a contest between the disease and the doctors. Their body is the battlefield, but they may nonetheless feel marginalized—more bystander than active participant.
“People sometimes feel like they’ve lost control of their own body,” says Lynda Balneaves, a professor in the University of Manitoba College of Nursing in Winnipeg, who studies the role of complementary and alternative methods (CAM) in cancer care. “Complementary therapies are a way to feel engaged; they’re something people can pursue on their own to regain a sense of control.”
By some estimates, 87% of individuals with cancer have tried at least one form of CAM. While patients may pursue these therapies in the hopes of slowing or reversing the course of their disease, they may also look to complementary or alternative medicine for help managing the symptoms and side effects of their prostate cancer treatment. “Chemotherapy and surgery and drug therapies all produce side effects, and sometimes we as healthcare professionals don’t do as great a job managing those side effects as we do treating the disease,” Balneaves says.
Since it’s likely their patients will pursue complementary therapies during the course of their treatment, care providers can play a supportive role by steering people toward evidence-based therapies and away from remedies that may be a poor use of time or money—or potentially even dangerous. “There are potential adverse interactions with some CAM treatments, and so we want to help individuals keep safety front of mind,” Balneaves says.
Here, she and other experts describe the complementary therapy landscape for people with prostate cancer.
The ‘Prostate 8’
For a 2017 review in the World Journal of Urology, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, San Francisco, examined dozens of epidemiological studies in an effort to determine whether lifestyle factors…
