Supportive cancer care: is integrative oncology the future?

Purpose Of Review: Nearly half of cancer patients use complementary therapies alongside the conventional cancer treatment. This clinical reality is a challenge for the medical team mainly to guarantee patient's safety. The evolution from Supportive Care to Integrative oncology is taking shape.

Probabilistic Reasoning in Homeopathy Practice and its Implications for Clinical Research.

The principle of similitude put forward by Hahnemann has challenging practical consequences in the selection of the right homeopathic medicine for a patient. According to this principle, only the medicines that best fit the totality of the symptoms of a given patient are supposed to really cure: this greatly depends on the homeopath's clinical analysis. In addition, a patient's illness may be more or less curable, depending on the characteristics of the disease.

A Case of Recurrent Urinary Tract Infection Successfully Treated during Homeopathic Supportive Care in Oncology.

Introduction: A 32-year-old patient with colon cancer consulted for homeopathic supportive care (HSC). She had also suffered from recurrent urinary tract infections (RUTIs) for 20 years. Could homeopathy treat these two very different issues with the same medicine?

The Patient's Main Concerns: Though the main reason for the consultation was a fear of the side effects of chemotherapy, the presence of -induced RUTIs affected the patient's quality of life.

Integrative Oncology: An International Perspective from Six Countries.

In June 2019, a meeting was held in Paris in which experts from different countries (Israel, Spain, Belgium, Italy, USA, and France) met to discuss a selection of topics in integrative oncology (IO). The objectives were to draw on the delegates' experience and expertise to begin an international collaboration, sharing details of differing existing models and discussing future perspectives to help define and guide practice in IO and define unmet needs. This report presents a summary of the meeting's main presentations, and also reports on the experts' responses to a questionnaire examining different aspects of IO service delivery, infrastructure, and utilization.

Use of Homeopathy in Integrative Oncology in Strasbourg, France: Multi-center Cross-Sectional Descriptive Study of Patients Undergoing Cancer Treatment.

Context:  The use of homeopathy in oncological supportive care seems to be progressing. The first French prevalence study, performed in 2005 in Strasbourg, showed that only 17% of the subjects were using it. What is the situation 12 years later?

Materials And Methods:  This is a descriptive study, using a questionnaire identical to that used in 2005, on 633 patients undergoing treatment in three anti-cancer centers in Strasbourg.

My best case: homeopathic management of adverse effects of tamoxifen.

Background: Nearly half of patients discontinue tamoxifen hormone therapy early because of side effects, thus increasing the risk of breast cancer recurrence. Could a homeopathic treatment improve compliance?

Methods: A patient suffering from side effects of tamoxifen was seen in consultation every 2 months for 10 months by a senior homeopathic doctor and a registrar.

Results: Case analysis and repertorisation led to the identification of Pulsatilla as the simillimum drug and tamoxifen 7c as the etiological treatment.

Homeopathic Treatment of Insomnia and Symptom Clusters Related to Cerebral Chemotoxicity in Oncology.

Background:  During chemotherapy, the correlation between insomnia and fatigue, anxiety, pain, depressed mood, and cognitive disorders makes these subjective complaints a 'symptom cluster' with common biological mechanisms. The theory of cerebral inflammation following the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines (high level of interleukin 1-β [IL1-β], IL6 and tumour necrosis factor-alpha) is currently the most generally accepted. Understanding these mechanisms should allow us to propose a chemoprotective homeopathic treatment of the nervous system.

Using hetero-isotherapics in cancer supportive care: the fruit of fifteen years of experience.

Background: Chemotherapy, hormone therapy, and new targeted therapies for cancer lead to adverse effects which are often difficult to relieve using classical homeopathy. Besides diminishing the quality of life of the patient, they can force the oncologist to reduce or even to cease treatment prematurely, which represents a loss of opportunity for the patient. Faced with these recurring problems, would the use of homeopathic dilution of chemotherapy, also called hetero-isotherapy, be a suitable response for improving the tolerance of and the adherence to cancer treatment?

Methods: Based on experiments conducted for over 50 years by many authors, we have offered our patients, since 1998, a protocol of hetero-isotherapy chemotherapy starting the day after each cytotoxic infusion.