Complementary vs Alternative Oncology

Many people are confused as to the difference between Complementary and Alternative oncology. What I do with my cancer patients is complementary. I work with them to complement their standard oncology care. Alternative is when a cancer patient does not work with the standard oncologist and only does alternative therapies.

I did my residency at Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) working side by side with oncologist, radiologists and surgeons to help my patients in a complementary fashion to get through their standard of care therapies. My approach is three pronged approach.

1. Functional Medicine: If you have cancer something in the body is not working right. We all make appoximately 100,000 cancer cells per day. However, if our body is working properly we take care of them. By the time a tumor is the size of the end of your little finger it is billions of cells. So the question is what in the body is not functioning properly. My job is to do what I call function medicine. Get the body to function the way it is suppose to. After getting my patients body to function properly, many of them tell me this is the best they have felt in years.
2. Personalized complementary oncology. Each patient gets a customized treatment plan that is cancer specific, chemo and radiaiton specific to reduce side effects without interfering with the treatments and reduces the chance of metastasis.
3. Remission retention: so when you are done with your treatments I put my patients on a program to decrease the chance of the cancer coming back.

Everything I do with my patients is well researched and documented. I am a member of the Oncology Association of Naturopathic Physicians and keep up on the latest of research through continuing education and oncology journals.