Cancer Cure News Update 2017: Patients Who Choose Alternative Medicine Twice as Likely to Die
Cancer patients who reject modern medicine in favor of alternative medicine are five times more likely to die. This is according to a study conducted by experts at the Yale School of Medicine who discovered that unconventional treatments result in higher death rates.
Using alternative medicine always comes with risks, be it side effects or more direct harm due to contamination. However, those who opt for these procedures do so with the hope of being cured or at least being alleviated from the worst of symptoms.
However, more often than not, these treatments have dangerous or even fatal consequences. Such is the case for those who tried alternative options in curing cancer.
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Comparing success rates of more than 700 patients, the team at the Yale School of Medicine went through 10 years of records in the National Cancer Database. There they found 280 patients who were diagnosed with early stage breast and lung cancer.
These patients opted to receive alternative treatments to treat the disease which included homeopathy, special diets and crystal healing. They then compared them to 560 patients with the same types of cancer but who instead chose to get conventional cancer treatment such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hormone therapy.
The patients were followed up for five years. And based on their comparisons, alternative treatments resulted in as much as a six-fold increase in the risk of death for breast cancer patients, fourfold increase in colorectal cancer, and twofold increase in lung cancer.
On average, patients who opt for alternative treatments are more than twice as likely to die as those who chose conventional medicine. Additionally, alternative medicine resulted in worse five-year survival rate with all cancers.
The team at the Yale School of Medicine hopes that these findings persuade cancer patients to receive conventional treatments rather than place their hopes on an unproven method of curing cancer.
