Integrative cancer care: Who, what, why, when and how — ASN Events

Integrative cancer care: Who, what, why, when and how (#37)

Donald Abrams 1
  1. University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States

As oncology technology advances into the 21st Century there is a strong temptation to focus more on the tumor and its actionable mutations than the patient with the malignancy. Integrative Oncology promotes patient-centered relationship-based care calling on the Hippocratic teaching that “it is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of a disease the person has.” The Integrative Oncologist may liken cancer to a weed. In addition to eradicating the weed, an additional goal is to work with the garden to make the soil as inhospitable as possible to growth and spread of the weed. Integrative Oncology is the rational, evidence-informed combination of conventional therapy with complementary interventions into an individualized therapeutic regimen that addresses the whole person living with cancer. This session will highlight some of the key tools of integrative oncology including nutrition, physical activity, supplements, stress reduction, mind-body therapies, spirituality and whole systems approaches, such as traditional Chinese medicine. Components of an Integrative Oncology consultation will be described. For the patient embarking on an often frightening and uncertain journey, the opportunity to be equipped with things that they can do to have a perceived role in their health and well-being during cancer treatment provides them with an enabling sense of empowerment and hope.

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