What Is Alternative Breast Cancer Treatment?
Before getting into specific cancer therapies, it’s important to understand the terminology. The words “alternative,” “complementary,” and “integrative” are often used interchangeably to describe non-traditional breast cancer treatments, but they have very different meanings. With some extreme exceptions, most non-traditional cancer therapies are not alternatives to standard treatments. Choosing alternative care in the case of breast cancer treatment would mean forgoing chemotherapy and radiation. More commonly, cancer patients are introduced to complementary therapies, which do just as the name suggests — they complement such traditional cancer treatments as chemotherapy and radiation, but they are not substitutes.
