Risks of alternative remedies for cancer

CANCER patients who choose alternative over conventional medicine are more than twice as likely to die of the disease.

That was the finding of researchers from the Yale School of Medicine and Yale Cancer Center who studied the outcomes of 840 patients with breast, prostate, lung and colorectal cancer over nine years.

They found that the 280 people who chose alternative medicine were far more likely to have died in that time than the 560 who opted for chemotherapy, surgery or radiotherapy.

The researchers, writing in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, urged for greater scrutiny of alternative medicine.