AI Article Synopsis
- Many cancer patients use complementary medicine alongside conventional treatments, but oncologists often lack the knowledge to guide them effectively.
- This study reviews systematic reviews of complementary therapies, analyzing their effects on health outcomes for cancer patients and highlighting therapies like acupuncture, music interventions, and yoga for pain relief, anxiety reduction, and fatigue improvement.
- While some therapies show positive effects and typically have mild side effects, there’s still uncertainty about certain interventions, and many reviews did not adequately address biases, indicating a need for better research and clinical guidelines.
Article Abstract
Many patients with cancer make use of complementary medicine alongside conventional medicine, but clinicians in oncology often lack the knowledge to adequately advise patients on the evidence base for complementary therapies. This study aims to provide an overview of recently published systematic reviews that assess the effects of complementary therapies on patient-reported health outcomes in patients with cancer. Systematic reviews, including a meta-analysis of at least two randomized controlled trials, were identified from the PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, CINAHL and PsycINFO databases. The methodological quality was assessed with AMSTAR 2. One hundred systematic reviews were included. The results suggest that several complementary therapies can improve health outcomes reported by patients with cancer, such as acupuncture to relieve pain, music interventions to reduce anxiety and yoga to improve cancer-related fatigue. The side effects related to complementary therapy use are generally mild. The results remain inconclusive for some intervention-outcome combinations. Many of the included systematic reviews insufficiently assessed the causes and impact of bias in their interpretation of the results. This overview of systematic reviews can support clinicians in counselling their patients on this topic and provide directions for future research and clinical practice guidelines in the field of complementary medicine.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10526744 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/cancers15184513 | DOI Listing |
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