WHAT IS INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE?
Integrative cancer care is about treating the whole person, not just the disease. It brings together conventional cancer treatments — such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy — with appropriate lifestyle approaches, complementary therapies and wellbeing support.
At Yes to Life, we believe people should feel informed, supported and empowered to explore the options available to them. A cancer diagnosis can be overwhelming, and no one should feel they have to choose between conventional treatment and other forms of support.
Integrative care is about considering how different approaches may work alongside one another, with your individual needs at the centre. Historically, it’s been an ‘either/or’ situation between conventional medicine and integrative approaches, which has often placed patients in an extremely difficult position at one of the most stressful points in their lives. Any open-minded patient looking for the best possible outcome is far less interested in the label attached to an approach, than in whether it could help them. This is the perspective that underpins Integrative Medicine.
Conventional Treatment – Standard of Care
Conventional treatment – often referred to as ‘Standard of Care’ – focuses on removing or killing cancer cells. It plays a vital role in cancer care and is often lifesaving, such as when dealing with a rapidly growing cancer or one that threatens a vital organ; and often early surgery can be sufficient to deliver a complete remission. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy are routinely used in conventional treatment with this same goal.
Lifestyle and Complementary Approaches
Lifestyle and complementary approaches can help support wellbeing and quality of life before, during and after treatment. Lifestyle practitioners typically focus on the process of cancer – what circumstances prompted it to start, what factors may be driving it – and overarchingly they are concerned with optimising the health and immunity of the patient. Lifestyle and Complementary approaches – combining multiple therapies – can result in a slowing or reversing of the process, which can deliver unexpectedly good outcomes in even late-stage cancers. With the proportion of cancers attributed to lifestyle ranging from 60% to well over 90%, depending on who you ask, there is no credible rationale for overlooking lifestyle approaches. These approaches also contribute to general wellbeing and to living well with cancer and beyond.
Integrative Cancer Care
The magic really happens when the full gamut of both approaches is available. The options that are right for you will depend on your circumstances, and it’s important to discuss any clinical therapies, supplements or changes with your cancer care team to help ensure they are safe and suitable. However, there are many small, yet meaningful, lifestyle adjustments you can proactively adapt from home, such as prioritising diet, exercise, sleep and stress reduction. Integrative cancer care blends clinical expertise with personal agency to deliver a powerful care plan that is uniquely tailored to you.
WHAT CAN INTEGRATION ACHIEVE?
Integrative medicine is about looking beyond the diagnosis to the person living with cancer — their physical health, emotional wellbeing and the things that matter to them. It’s not either/or; it’s about bringing together relevant care pathways to support you through treatment, recovery and beyond.
For example:
Before Treatment
Nutrition interventions can help prepare for treatment, reduce inflammation, buffer against immune-suppressive effects and minimise damage from chemotherapy, radiation or surgery trauma.
During Treatment
There are many modalities to support wellbeing, minimise side effects, and optimise energy and resilience during treatment. These include established clinical therapies using heat (hyperthermia), cold (cryotherapy) or oxygen (hyperbaric oxygen therapy), alongside exercise, fasting, naturopathic medicine, homeopathy and a broad range of holistic practices.
Following Treatment
This is one of the most important periods where integration can deliver most and help lower the risk of relapse or reoccurrence. Integrative Practitioners continually focus on the mediating factors that may have contributed to the cancer burden and will recommend all relevant modalities and therapies to reduce risk and restore metabolic health. This may include continuation of therapies previously mentioned above, repurposed drugs, new and emerging therapies.
The goal is to thrive and not just survive.
WE NEED INTEGRATION NOW
Imagine the power of integrating the technical sophistication of conventional medicine with the deep understanding of the foundations of health and wellbeing that lifestyle and complementary medicine has established. Our NHS can deliver superlative results in highly sophisticated surgical procedures, yet flounders when it comes to treating patients with care and compassion, responding to them as people rather than a collection of body parts or as a disease type, or delivering patient choice and patient-centred care – which successive governments have attempted, but largely failed, to introduce for more than four decades.
While lifestyle and complementary medicine make no pretence to be able to respond adequately to a heart attack, the entire sector is immersed in an ethos that is caring, wholistic and patient-centred – it’s in a complementary therapist’s DNA. Integrating the complementary and lifestyle sector into our cancer care will address the desperately needed reforms to the outdated didactic and patriarchal system that stubbornly persists.
The evidence for lifestyle and complementry approaches has built exponentially in recent years. It’s deeply uncaring and disrespectful towards those with cancer to dismiss all such interventions as ‘having no evidence’ without even troubling to look. The only basis on which this could be said to be true in any way, is when it comes to randomised, placebo-controlled trials (RCTs). It’s now aundantly clear that the ‘gold standard’ of evidence, the RCT, is totally unsuited to natural medicines, let alone complex protocols involving multiple simultaneous interventions, and far too expensive to apply to a low-profit product such as a supplement. The evidence is there in spades for many lifestyle interventions – albeit not RCTs – but quite sufficient on which to base the adoption of strategies that are almost universally cheap, safe and health-promoting.
The understanding of, and interest in, the building blocks of good health that preoccupies lifestyle practitioners is largely absent from our healthcare system, leading to criticisms that it is actually a disease management system. The most important cancer strategy needed at this point – where one in two of us will get cancer – is prevention. And the strategies for prevention are deeply intertwined with those for people with a cancer diagnosis. Precisely the same understandings of the process of cancer inform strategies for prevention.
Where can I start?
If you’re new to integrative cancer care, start with our “I’m New Here” page for a friendly introduction. You can also explore the Life Directory to discover practitioners and services, connect with others through our Wigwam cancer support groups, access free online wellbeing classes, or browse our radio and podcast interviews, conference recordings, books and guides to learn more.
There are a huge range of safe, inexpensive resources available to help people with cancer achieve better outcomes and quality of life, right now. To fail to move quickly towards integration is to fail people with cancer.
Click here for an extensive video introduction to Integrative Medicine.
