Cancer Survivors Live Longer With Herbal Medicine and Vitamins

Beat the Odds.

Lung cancer patients who use Herbal Medicine and Vitamins long term along with conventional cancer treatment have longer and higher survival rates.

48% of all cancer patients currently use some form of alternative medicine during their cancer treatment.

We are now seeing more studies supporting the value of combining alternative medicine with cancer treatment in an Integrative Cancer Care Collaborative Team Approach.

A recently published study conducted over ten years in the Journal of Integrative Cancer Therapies: “Lung Cancer Survival with Herbal Medicine in a Whole Systems Approach, Ten Year Follow-up” demonstrates clearly that there is a significant survival benefit when patients combine conventional oncology (surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy) with targeted Herbal Medicine and Vitamin protocols.

This is particularly meaningful because lung cancer can spread quickly and is difficult to treat effectively with conventional cancer treatment.

Two to seven times as many patients survive and live more years when conventional treatment is combined with and followed by long term use of Herbal Medicine and Vitamins.

Chemotherapy is too toxic to be given daily over long periods of time, while herbal medicines and vitamins can be taken for years very safely, under the guidance of a health care professional with this expertise.

For patients with the most widely spread and advanced disease, Stage 4 lung cancer, 82% of those treated long term with Herbal Medicine and Vitamins were alive after one year, while only 17% of patients  who were treated with conventional therapy alone were alive after one year.

Over four times as many people survived at one year.

At five years, 14% of those treated with a Whole Systems Approach survived, while only 2% of those treated conventionally had survived. That’s a seven fold better survival rate with Herbs and Vitamins over five years.

For Stage 3 Lung Cancer patients, whose disease was less widely spread, the one year survival rate was 93% vs. 47% respectively. Twice as many patients were alive at one year.

And at five years the treated group had a 32% vs 11% survival rate. Three times as many patients were still alive after five years.

At the Pine Street Clinic, where these patients were treated by very experienced clinicians, individualized traditional and modern Asian and Chinese medicine are combined with specific vitamin therapies for each patient. These “treated” patients were compared to matched untreated patients at Kaiser Permanente and patient data in the California Cancer Registry.

Doctors Michael McCulloch and Michael Broffman, who conducted the study (with others), are seasoned clinicians with decades of experience using both Traditional and Modern Chinese Herbal Medicine combined in a Whole Systems approach with specific Vitamins and nutraceuticals.

The study concludes that there is “a substantial long term survival advantage in Stage 3 and Stage 4 when patients used Herbal Medicine and Vitamin protocols long term.

Stage 3 and Stage 4 are advanced, metastatic cancers that have spread from the initial location of the cancer to other sites in the body.

It is important to emphasize that these survival benefits …increased years of life…were a result of combining these therapies with conventional cancer treatments, not instead of conventional cancer treatments.

When we see significantly longer lives for a significant percentage of patients, this should get our attention. This should cause us to encourage cancer patients and  their physicians to seek out care providers experienced in treating cancer patients collaboratively with Herbal Medicine and Vitamin Therapies long term.