Abstract
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Indice]
The extension of life span, life styles, a polluted environment, poor attention to the food quality, the spread of early diagnosis are among the main causes of the absolute rising incidence of cancer diagnosis, that the medical professionals and society must face.
The diagnosis of cancer scare, today as in the past, the patient, who suddenly finds himself in a world where extreme technicism of medical acts and frequent depersonalization of which is the object, along with profound physical and psychological pain, common in conventional therapies, led him to seek help in the world of unconventional medicine.
In fact, together with the awareness of the limits of the approach based on solely aggression of cancer with cytotoxic chemotherapy, a perceived lack of attention to its global needs is perceived: the goal is too often just the cancellation of the disease from the body of sick, but the need to have a qualitatively better life has been overlooked.
For these reasons the search for a holistic view of the patient and his disease, and the reliance on various forms of non-conventional medicine, is increasing, but unfortunately methods that do not have adequate scientific support are accepted.
The understandable fear of the patient facing the diagnosis of cancer leads him to look for, on the internet and among relatives, all forms of possible therapy, but due to the lack of competence and the lack of a serious check on the reliability of the information, exposes him to serious risks.
The lack of knowledge of supportive therapies from the “official” oncology world, at least in Italy, and the distrust of oncologists, makes sure that the patient very frequently does not communicate to physicians that they are using CAM methods.
The result is that patients often undergo useless therapies, or even worse, they trust methods that may decrease the effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments, essentially for mechanisms of enzyme induction and increased inactivation of chemotherapy.
At the same time they may subtract CAM therapies studied and who have given positive clinical and experimental indications: there is not shortage of publications well done, and that are numerically increasing more and more, in recognition of the validity of these approaches, and the desire to arrive at a treatment more individualized and less toxic to the patient.
There are also cases in which the patient relies exclusively to the CAM, and if this may be understandable, and is also guaranteed by law, in the case of a free choice, is not acceptable when the patient decides on the basis of information not scientifically demonstrated.
This happens frequently, because of the lack of clear standards of reference and especially a public and free of prejudice confrontation, carried out by competent physicians, who can give the correct information to the patient and allow a free choice “informed”.
To contribute to a selection of reliable methods are here considered a number of scientific publications in peer reviewed journals, and shown how some of the proposed methods can be used safely to improve the state of health of the cancer patient in chemo/radiation therapy.
Key words: Life Quality, integrated therapy, antioxidants, unconventional therapies,
cytotoxic cancer therapies, cancer
