Survey: Most Cancer Patients Use Complementary or Alternative Medicine

In a recent survey, 70% of cancer patients said they use complementary or alternative medicine as part of their cancer care.

About 30% of patients said they use complementary or alternative medicine as anticancer treatment, and about 27% of users said they did not tell their oncologist they were using complementary or alternative medicine.

These findings were published in JCO Oncology Practice.

The survey was distributed to 2 cancer centers in the same city between 2020 and 2021. A total of 749 patients completed the survey, which included questions about complementary or alternative medicine use, informational sources, and trust of sources.

The median age of the cohort was 63 (range, 52-71) years, 51.8% were men, 94.8% were White, and 49.8% had metastatic disease. Patients had breast (22.7%), prostate (18.6%), colorectal (11.7%), skin (10.5%), lung (9.1%), or other cancers.

Anticancer treatments included surgery (64.9%), chemotherapy (47.5%), radiation (44.2%), and endocrine therapy (25.1%). A minority of patients reported receiving no directed cancer treatment (3.1%). The median time from diagnosis to survey administration was 15 (range, 6-36) months.

Use of Complementary or Alternative Medicine

Overall, 70.2% of patients said they used complementary or alternative medicine (not including mind-body interventions) as part of cancer care. Patients used complementary or alternative medicine to manage their symptoms (42.2%), treat their cancer (30.4%), improve their mental health (15.5%), or for other reasons (11.8%).

Vitamin D was the most commonly used complementary or alternative medicine (32.1%), followed by fish oil (11.6%) and a vegetarian diet (6.1%).

Most patients (91.2%) reported using complementary or alternative medicine in addition to conventional medicine, but 27.1% of these patients did not tell their treating oncologist about this.

Sixteen patients said they used complementary or alternative medicine to treat their cancer instead of conventional medicine, and 5 of these patients (31.3%) did not inform their treating oncologist.

Sources of Information

Most patients (n=624) said they had received a recommendation for or heard about complementary or alternative medicine, most commonly vitamins/minerals (51.7%), herbs/supplements (43.8%), specific diets (39.5%), or mind-body interventions (38.3%).

Of the 309 patients who reported how they learned about complementary or alternative medicine, 16.8% said they looked for information themselves, 36.6% said they received the information from someone else, and 46.6% reported both.

Sources of complementary or alternative medicine included close friends or relatives (52.8%), distant friends (28.5%), social media (25.9%), websites (25.2%), support groups or other patients (22.7%), cancer physicians (17.8%), naturopaths (12.6%), other physicians (12.0%), news media (11.7%), and other sources.  

Trust in Sources

Most patients who used complementary or alternative medicine (86.6%) said they were somewhat or very likely to trust oncologists as a source of information.

Compared to patients who did not use complementary or alternative medicine, patients who did had higher rates of trust in chiropractors (P =.002), support groups (P <.002), close friends/family (P =.002), and distant friends, associates, or relatives (P =.007).

In a multivariate analysis, trust in a nonmedical source for complementary or alternative medicine information was significantly more likely among women than men (odds ratio [OR], 1.75; 95% CI, 1.01-3.03; P =.05).

The analysis also showed that patients with a graduate degree were significantly less likely than patients without a college degree to trust a non-physician source (OR, 0.32; 95% CI, 0.19-0.53; P <.01).

“Although patients most commonly heard about CAM [complementary or alternative medicine] from nonmedical sources, their reported trust in physicians remains high, regardless of the decision to use CAM,” the researchers wrote. “Our findings support the role of clinicians as trusted information sources for patients and identify an important opportunity for combating cancer treatment-related misinformation.”

Disclosures: Some study authors declared affiliations with biotech, pharmaceutical, and/or device companies. Please see the original reference for a full list of disclosures.

Reference

Hutten RJ, Weil CR, King AJ, et al. Multi-institutional analysis of cancer patient exposure, perceptions, and trust in information sources regarding complementary and alternative medicine. JCO Oncol Pract. Published online September 18, 2023. doi:10.1200/OP.23.00179

This article originally appeared on Cancer Therapy Advisor