Why do some people choose alternative medicine for their cancer treatment?

The expense and toxicity of cancer drugs means we have an obligation to expose patients to treatment only when they can reasonably expect an improvement in survival or quality of life. The study by Davis and colleagues suggests we may be falling far short of this important benchmark.

These articles below have come from the experiences of editors of two of the world's most prestigious medical journals.

Ex-editor of NEJM tells how Big Pharma has corrupted academic institutions, 5^th May 2010

In the May/June 2009 issue of the Boston Review, Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, details the sordid story of how corporate dollars have corrupted research and education at academic medical centres - including at her current place of employment, the Harvard Medical School.

To a remarkable extent … medical centres have become supplicants to the drug companies, deferring to them in ways that would have been unthinkable even twenty years ago. Often, academic researchers are little more than hired hands who supply human subjects and collect data according to instructions from corporate paymasters. The sponsors keep the data, analyse it, write the papers, and decide whether and when and where to submit them for publication. In multi-centre trials, researchers may not even be allowed to see all of the data, an obvious impediment to science and a perversion of standard practice."

Conflicts of interest affect more than research. They also directly shape the way medicine is practiced, through their influence on practice guidelines issued by professional and governmental bodies and through their effects on FDA decisions." Angell offers several examples, including this one: "In 2004, after the NIH National Cholesterol Education Program called for sharply lowering the acceptable levels of 'bad' cholesterol, it was revealed that eight of nine members of the panel writing the recommendations had financial ties to the makers of cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Drug companies support educational programs even within our best medical schools and teaching hospitals, and are given virtually unfettered access to young doctors to ply them with gifts and meals and promote their wares. … This is marketing masquerading as education. … But doctors do learn something from all the ostensible education they're paid to receive. Doctors and their patients come to believe that for everyailment and discontent there is a drug, even when changes in lifestyle would be more effective. And they believe that the newest, most expensive brand-name drugs are superior to older drugs or generics, even though there is seldom any evidence to that effect because sponsors don't usually compare their drugs with older drugs at equivalent doses.

Why we can't trust clinical guidelines. 14^th June 2013, BMJ

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Offline, What is medicine's 5 sigma?11^th April 2015, The Lancet

More recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote that the case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.

To summarise, no wonder some people choose to opt out. It is their choice and they should not be maligned for making it. There is an inherent danger in accepting conventional cancer treatment that needs to NOT be hidden from the patient.