It’s easy to be confused by which complementary treatment options to choose for the serious diagnosis of breast cancer. Here’s what I’ve learned through the last couple of years of my tutelage with master herbal clinician, Dr Matt Van Benschoten, O.M.D: Herbal medicines are never intended to be stand alone treatments of cancer.
Surprisingly, even in much of Asia—China, Japan and Korea— surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are always first line treatments. The most powerful branches of Chinese medicine—customized herbal formulas, acupuncture, Qi Gong and diet are used to make those western treatments even more effective and help limit their toxicity, but they are not intended to be a substitute for them.
Nonetheless, there exists extensive documentation in scientific literature on the synergistic (cooperative) effects of herbal medicines with specific chemotherapies. For instance, Adriamycin, while one of the most common first line drugs used in breast cancer also has significant toxicities—especially for the heart. Luckilly, there are a number of herbal medicines that have been documented to be cardio-protective against the damaging effects of Adriamycin. Furthermore, there are specific herbal medicines that have been documented to enhance the effectiveness of Adriamycin. And perhaps most overlooked, there are herbal medicines that help reverse resistance to that drug. One example shows up when cells become resistant to Adriamycin and you give a patient herbs, then you give the drug again and the Adriamycin works because the herbs make the cells less resistant to it.
So that’s the basis that herbal medicine has a role to play in cancer treatments. Not as a stand-alone therapy but as something to make the conventional treatment more effective, less toxic and to avoid developing resistance.
