By Vincent Chan
In secondary school, I once sat through a lecture by an alternative medicine practitioner. He described how a combination of dinosaur egg and traditional herbs had cured a prominent politician of his lymphoma. I remember thinking then that the politician must have also received care from western-trained doctors too!
No, Thank You
I have an elderly patient who was recently diagnosed with third stage sigmoid colon cancer. He had just had his operation and was scheduled to begin radiation therapy next.
However, he decided not to proceed with radiation. His older brother had had radiation therapy for a brain tumor and had died after two cycles of treatment. He was sure the therapy had hastened his brother’s death and was determined to avoid this himself. Instead, he started on traditional Chinese herbal treatment.
He told me he believed the herbs were actively killing the cancer cells. To this I blurted out, how do you know? His reply was silence.
Commentary
When I think of alternative medicine and serious diseases like cancer, I think the issues boil down to just this — the interplay of fear and hope.
In the process of offering treatment, the modern doctor is bound to disclose the benefits and harms of his proposed options. The patient, already under the weight of his diagnosis, is easily overwhelmed by this, and fear can rapidly set in and drive him to seek alternative treatment options. We doctors are always concerned that alternative medicine may be offering the patient false hope at a time of great duress. If true, this is tragic, regardless of the good faith in which the hope is being offered.
The drawing depicts the alarm that we western-trained doctors feel when we see the patient taking alternative remedies and serenely ignoring the fire as it burns the house down around her, taking her with it.
A study by Johnson et al showed that when alternative medicine was used as the sole anti-cancer treatment, it was associated with a greater risk of death. News reports tell the same story. One such report in January 2019 tells of a young child who perished after herbal remedies were used to treat his cancer.
Do we know too little to judge? Are we looking at oranges and judging them like apples? Fortunately, when the stakes are not so high, as with less serious conditions, we judge less, and less hastily.
—-Dr Vincent Chan
Vincent Chan practices in the heartlands. He loves the people aspect of his job, and hopes he is serving the community well as a general practitioner.
The commentary and vignette were reproduced with permission from the book “Being Human, Stories from Family Medicine” edited by Cheong Pak Yean and Ong Chooi Peng and published in 2021 by the College of Family Physicians Singapore.
Pictures of illness experiences were drawn by NUS medical students in workshops conducted from 2012-2017 by A/Prof Cheong Pak Yean. Senior family physicians subsequently shared vignettes and commentaries based on the pictures.
