Psychopharmaoncology And Complimentary And Nonconventional Treatments In Oncology

Abstract

Cancer is a life-threatening disease, and cancer treatments are traumatic, mutilative, functionally impairing, and disruptive to family, work, and personal life, whereas patients often hope for resumption of as near normal a life as possible. Cancer survival outcomes are improving year after year, but treatments often fail to achieve the substantive cures that patients seek, or they may do so, but at significant cost to the patient’s and their family’s overall health and well-being. Psychological therapies are intended to help patients deal with the emotional impacts, but may be seen as a symptomatic treatment, and where psychotherapies are culturally established, many patients prefer alternatives, rejecting the implications that they are psychologically “disturbed”. Even when psychotherapeutic services are available patients often adopt complementary/alternative (CAM) therapeutic methods, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Qi Gong, Yoga, Ayurveda, meditation, and a variety of others, warranting consideration of their potential psychological contributions in cancer. In this chapter we first consider the evidence underpinning cancer-related distress and common symptoms. The complexity and comorbidity of many symptom clusters make symptom control difficult even when the cause is well understood. CAM can offer novel approaches to help manage some of these conditions. The remainder of the chapter continues this evidence-based approach by evaluating the evidence for two main Asian complementary approaches: TCM and Yoga to enhance the management of psychosocial distress, suffering, and other psychosocial demands associated with aspects of cancers and their treatments.