Alternative and Complementary Medicine Moves Forward at Mount Zion

The UCSF/Mt Zion Breast Care Center Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Program is dedicated to designing and conducting rigorous scientific research to assess the value of various non-conventional modalities to treat breast cancer and diseases of the breast. These scientific findings will be utilized to educate the community and health care providers by generating and disseminating objective data as the basis for integrative medicine. We are committed to providing broad access to proven integrative care that can ensure the best possible outcome for women with breast cancer.

Our Current Focus:

Did you know that approximately 64% of women in the Bay area use at least one form of alternative medicine? Three priorities we are working on include: a Chinese Herbal Therapy (CHT) study, a registry for users of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and a Tibetan Medicine study. Although we are not ready to enroll patients at this time, the following is a brief summary of the status of each of our trials.

CHT:

This study was recently redesigned as a double-blind, randomized placebo controlled study. We did this to more fully evaluate any side effects associated with a particular CHT formula (including 21 herbs) and to document their safety in combination with chemotherapy. Quality of life, mood states, patient preferences and concerns about CHT will also be obtained. The target population is women with stage I or II breast cancer for whom AC chemotherapy is recommended. They will take the usual medications for side effects. but in addition, one group will receive the CHT and the other a placebo. The entry criteria also include specific lab values and anyone with a history of acute cardiac disease will be excluded.

We spent many hours on our physician-sponsored IND (Investigational New Drug) application. This was sent to the FDA to ask for approval to begin our project. This is in addition to re-submitting our proposal to the UCSF/Mt. Zion Committee on Human Research. And, we just received funding from the Arkay Foundation for our initial trial.

TCM Registry:

TCM has been used for centuries to cure cancer, prolong life, increase the quality of life and help with the side effects of Western therapies. However, information about toxicity and efficacy has been mostly anecdotal. The aim of our study is to collect longitidunal data on a cohort of women with any stage of breast cancer to determine demographics, motivations, patterns and preferences of use, treatments used and their costs, dietary habits and other complementary/alternative therapies used. Over the long term, we will examine time to progression, rate of recurrence, survival, quality of life and if there is a correlation between Western and TCM diagnoses.

Tibetan Medicine :

At the end of the fall, we met several times in Berkeley with Dr. Yeshi Dondon, former personal physician for the Dalai Lama, who has been treating women with breast cancer with Tibetan herbs for many years. He will be collaborating with us on a study using seven of his herbal formulas, for which we will be filing an IND.

A closing thought from a recent studyon health care and consumer choice by Kelner and Wellman (1997): 59% of patients who use CAM expressed their belief that they have a personal responsibility for helping own in partnership with their practitioner whereas70% of patients of family physicians believed that for most illnesses, it was the physician who helped them most. It is our belief that the best model for health care integrates the patient, the alternative practitioner and the Western physician.