Cancer Patients

Patients diagnosed with cancer have many needs. The news comes as a shock, and maybe for the first time the individual must face his or her mortality. So before health service providers even think about the role of medicine, they must consider patients’ needs for moral and spiritual support. At times like this, a close supportive family and membership of a faith community are invaluable. Sadly, there are many cancer sufferers who lack family support and have no spiritual mentor. So perhaps one explanation for the growth in the interest in complementary and alternative medicine even among cancer patients is the unmet need of the patient when conventional medical practice fails to fill this aching void.

The next need for cancer subjects is to be free of whatever symptoms plague their life as a result of the disease. Of course, in the early stages the patients may be symptom-free, but in the later stages suffering is common from pain, nausea and weakness. The science of pain control is well established and palliative care for those close to the end is a well-developed specialty thanks to the British hospice movement. In addition, there may well be a role for interventions such as therapeutic massage, acupuncture and counselling to help the patient feel better.

Relatively new is the discipline of ‘psycho-social oncology’, which aims to identify and manage the more subtle subjective symptoms of cancer, such as anxiety and depression. This field of activity emerged about 20 years ago with the development of psychometric instruments, and it addresses the psychological, social, spiritual and behavioural dimensions thrown up by the diagnosis of cancer from both perspectives: those of the patient and those of his or her friends and family members. Furthermore, there exists a mind-body nexus that, in theory, could be modulated to influence the natural course of the disease so that if the patient ‘feels better’ it might indirectly help them ‘get better’.