PO122 INTEGRATION OF COMPLEMENTARY THERAPIES FOR TREATMENT OF ADVANCED BREAST CANCER – Ann Fonfa

​PO122 INTEGRATION OF COMPLEMENTARY THERAPIES FOR TREATMENT OF ADVANCED BREAST CANCER Ann Fonfa, Princetta Scott The Annie Appleseed Project, Delray Beach, FL, USA It is a given that people with advanced cancer will be harmed by the very treatments that purport to help them. Over time they will be given a vast array of therapies, all of which are toxic in one way or another. Adverse effects may be short term or long. How is this dealt with currently? From the patient/advocate perspective we see ONLY a medical/pharmaceutical approach. But the prevention and treatment of adverse effects – which we characterize as the UNWANTED effects, not SIDE effects, can be dealt with using complementary modalities in many cases. We suggest these are tried first. Giving someone a pill to stop a problem generally leads to more problems, more issues for their weakened bodies. It no longer seems acceptable to us to cause harms for people you know you cannot ‘cure’. Given that the current level of treatment is considered palliative, it is necessary to expand the adjunctive products used. Studies have been done for years on the value of OTC dietary supplements, Traditional Chinese Medicine, exercise, relaxation techniques and much more. Very few will rise to the level of randomized clinical trials – thus never making it onto the medical doctors’ radar screen. Yet there is a large body of evidence to suggest (strongly) that these methods are very much worth using, especially among these patients. An example would be glutamine: Glutamine Supplementation in Cancer Patients Receiving Bone Marrow Transplantation and High Dose Chemotherapy Journal of Nutrition. 2001;131:2578S-2584S At a time when many institutions were offering high dose chemotherapy with bone marrow transplantations – a completely unproven treatment, this paper came out. Or Synergistic Anti-Cancer Effects of Grape Seed Extract and Conventional Cytotoxic Agent Doxorubicin Against Human Breast Carcinoma Cells Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 85 (1): 1-12, May 2004 Part of their findings: “.results suggest a strong possibility of synergistic efficacy of GSE and Dox combination for breast cancer treatment, independent of estrogen receptor status of the cancer cell”. While researching for this abstract, we found this intriguing study: Combination Therapy of Active Hexose Correlated Compound (AHCC) Plus UFT Significantly Reduces the Metastasis of Rat Mammary Carcinoma, Anti-Cancer Drugs 1998, 9, 343-350 K. Matsushita, et al., (University School of Medicine, Laboratory of Pathology, Cancer Institute, Hokkaido) 1998. We will show more studies on a variety of ideas to reduce/avoid the harms of conventional cancer treatment for those with advanced breast cancer. First do no harm.

Abstracts / The Breast 20 (2011)