Homeopathy isn’t much help Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

People who choose alternative medicine over conventional treatment for their cancer are more likely to die from the disease.

That’s what Skyler Johnson and his colleagues at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut found when they looked at treatment and survival records from the US National Cancer Database.

The team identified 281 people with breast, prostate, lung and colorectal cancer who had opted for unproven treatments, shunning conventional approaches such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery.


Johnson doesn’t know what alternative treatments these people took, but has seen many of his own patients opt for a wide range of therapies. “They could be herbs, botanicals, homeopathy, special diets or energy crystals, which are basically just stones that people believe have healing powers,” he says.

More than twice as likely to die

The team then compared the health outcomes of these people with 560 others who were similar to them in terms of age, race and disease, but instead underwent conventional treatment.

They found that people who took alternative medicine were two and half times more likely to die within five years of diagnosis. This is a low estimate, says Johnson, skewed by the fact that prostate cancer, for example, takes longer than that to develop into a life-threatening disease.

Among those with breast cancer, people taking alternative remedies were 5.68 times more likely to die within five years. While 41 per cent of those receiving conventional treatment for lung cancer survived for at least five years, only 20 per cent of those who opted out of such treatment did.

And only 33 per cent of people using alternative medicine for colorectal cancer survived the next five years, compared to 79 per cent of those on conventional treatments.

Secondary treatment

The reason some people on alternative treatments survive is probably because many eventually seek out conventional treatment, often once their disease has progressed, says Johnson. Such secondary treatments were not recorded in the database.

John Bridgewater, an oncologist at University College London Hospital, is not surprised by the findings. “Many patients will often go on special diets, rather than having conventional treatment,” he says. “But we have no evidence that anyone benefits from these diets, apart from those that collect the fees.”

The people in the analysis who opted for alternative treatments generally tended to be wealthier and better educated. In the US, medical insurance doesn’t cover unproven treatments, so only richer people can afford the most expensive treatments, says Johnson.

“Herbs and diets don’t sound expensive, but when these things are delivered through providers, they can come with a hefty bill,” he says. “It’s a multibillion dollar industry. People pay more out-of-pocket for alternative treatments than they do for standard treatments.”

Journal reference: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, DOI: 10.1093/jnci/djx145

Read more: Cancer’s penicillin moment: Drugs that unleash the immune system