Part five of six
The Things That Are Not Pills
Where the strongest evidence in this book turned out to be.
The chapters
Exercise 1 entry Sleep, Stress and the Mind 6 entries The Microbiome 6 entries What the register holds for this part
13 entries across 3 of these chapters, in the
book's order. The letter after each one is the grade its claim carries; where an
intervention carries more than one claim, more than one letter is shown.
Chapter 22. Sleep, Stress and the Mind
Chapter 23. The Microbiome
Part Four: Supplements · Part Six: Deciding · All six parts
Before you read this
This register does not tell anyone what to take, and it carries no doses, for any compound, at any grade. Everything here is written to help you ask your oncology team a better question, not to answer one on your own.
It cannot see you. It does not know your diagnosis, your treatment or your medicines, and nothing on it is personalised to you.
Across curable cancers, choosing alternative medicine instead of conventional treatment was associated with 2.5 times the risk of death. Using it alongside conventional treatment showed no survival difference once treatment delay and refusal were accounted for: a hazard ratio of 1.39, with an interval from 0.83 to 2.33.
The danger is in what gets declined, not in what gets added.
Johnson SB, Park HS, Gross CP, Yu JB. Use of alternative medicine for cancer and its impact on survival. JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2018;110(1):121-124. doi:10.1093/jnci/djx145 · Johnson SB, Park HS, Gross CP, Yu JB. Complementary medicine, refusal of conventional cancer therapy, and survival among patients with curable cancers. JAMA Oncology 2018;4(10):1375-1381. doi:10.1001/jamaoncol.2018.2487
