Yet an increasing number of knowledgeable cancer patients are betting that integrating complementary therapies with the best of the conventional may improve their odds. By contrast, some of the alternative pharmacological therapies should be approaches much more skeptically. Some offer opportunities for unscrupulous marketing of expensive and unproven remedies that have none of the obvious benefits of the life-style approaches and can be harmful. A regimen of regular exercise, yoga or tai chi is among the complementary physical approaches that inspire confidence and are plausible. That is, basically how much physical stamina a patient will have in encounters with cancer and its treatment.
Functional status is a modest but significant predictor of improved survival rate with many cancers.
Similarly, scientific studies show that relaxation techniques somewhat improve immune function. Studies also show that intense stress can enhance the growth of some cancer tumors in animals, and probably in humans as well. The most famous psychological study is by Dr. David Spiegel, a Stanford professor, who found that women with metastatic breast cancer who joined a psychological support group had twice the average survival rate of women who underwent the same medical treatment but did not participate in a support group. Dr. Fawzy Fawzy, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, has found support groups to have similar benefits for patients with malignant melanoma. Both studies were small and preliminary, but the research certainly was interesting.