People Who Choose Alternative Treatments
People who choose alternative treatments tend to believe that evidence-based medicine is ineffective, while still believing that their own health could be improved. They are impressed by physiological and other scientific-sounding information, prefer a healthcare model that treats the patient as an integrated, whole person, and are loyal to their alternative healthcare providers.
Cancer patients who choose complementary or alternative treatments in addition to conventional treatments believe themselves less likely to die than patients who choose only conventional treatments. They feel a greater sense of control over their destinies, and report less anxiety and depression.
However, patients who use alternative treatments have a poorer survival time, even after controlling for type and stage of disease. The reason that patients using alternative treatments die sooner may be because patients who accurately perceive that they are likely to survive do not attempt unproven remedies, and patients who accurately perceive that they are unlikely to survive are attracted to unproven remedies. Among patients who believe their condition to be untreatable by evidence-based medicine, "desperation drives them into the hands of anyone with a promise and a smile." Con artists have long exploited fear, ignorance, and desperation to strip dying people of their money, comfort, and dignity.
About half the practitioners who dispense complementary or alternative treatments are physicians, although they tend to be generalists rather than oncologists. As many as 60% of physicians have referred their patients to a complementary or alternative practitioner for some purpose.
Read more about this topic: Alternative Cancer Treatments
Famous quotes containing the words people who, people, choose and/or alternative:
“People who whisper lie.”
—Swedish proverb, trans. by Verne Moberg.
“Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. And when the people eat the stuff they raise, and living in the houses they build, I’ll be there, too.”
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“Lord Tyrawley and I have been dead these two years, but we don’t choose to have it known.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)