Cancer - General

More than 10 million persons in the United States are cancer survivors, and 65% of Americans diagnosed with cancer now live more than 5 years with a need for informed recommendations on nutrition and lifestyle, and yet the advice given by healthcare professionals is often conflicting. During diagnosis and treatment anorexia, early feelings of fullness, taste, smell, and gastrointestinal tract disturbances are common; and malnutrition and weight loss occur in more than 50% of the patients. After treatment, nutrition/exercise issues are still important in either preventing recurrence or improving a person's immune system.

In general, cancer-related alternative medicine refers to therapies, such as mistletoe or coenzyme Q-10 (CoQ10)*, that may be used instead of conventional treatments. Complementary or integrative medicine, on the other hand, usually means therapies used in conjunction with traditional treatments.

Although the first report by the Institute for Health was released in 1999, stating that medical errors were responsible for as many as 98,000 deaths each year, when you read the statistics from the 2006 report, you will be shocked to learn that hospital patients should still expect to suffer one adverse drug event (due to human error) every day they remain hospitalized. Not very comforting... Perhaps legislation is needed to ensure (at the very least) that prescriptions are PRINTED legibly.

A three‑year UCLA study involving men being treated for prostate cancer has found that drinking an eight-ounce glass of pomegranate juice daily stabilized PSA levels 4 times longer than expected.

Abnormal cells usually commit suicide, but cancer cells do not. There are a number of therapeutic antibodies that help kill cancer cells by binding to antigens expressed on the surface of cancer cells. This binding triggers a cell death process that leads to the eradication of the abnormal cells. Such antibodies are in high demand, but they are slow and expensive to produce.