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The Best Method of Medicine for the Treatment of Cancer: CAM or Drugs

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Cancer is an important health problem that has strongly increased over the past couple of decades. According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 1,638,910 people in the United States are diagnosed with cancer each year; that is around 187 people per minute. This disease is ranked as the second most common cause of death in America. With cancer being so common today, there needs to be an effective and relatively fast treatment plan to cure the victims of cancer without causing more harm to them. Extensive research and analysis is critical to determine the best method of treatment. Cancer can be fatal but recent advancement and better understanding of the disease has produced major triumph in overcoming the ailment. Aside from …show more content…

The most effective treatment is chosen from the effectiveness, side effects, quality of life, and tumor shrinkage, based on the guidelines set by Irving’s (2012) study. I compared the best treatments from both methods of medicine and reviewed several experiments that were conducted on cancer patients using the top treatments.
In order to extensively evaluate these guidelines, I started from the development of a treatment plan. Each treatment plan should be tailored to the patient’s specific variables regarding their type of cancer. Lamson (2007) lays out a set of variables that could be used for all forms of cancer. When considering a treatment plan, it is important to also think about the future that precedes the initial treatment.
It is estimated in Michaud’s (2008) study that 30%–50% of patients will relapse and die of their disease if no further treatment is mentioned by their doctors. If a relapse occurs within 5 years of the initial treatment the patient is not considered “cured” or a survivor. The main goal of CAM doctors is to ensure the patient’s quality of life is greatly increased; on the other hand, biomedicine doctors generally focus on prolonging a patient’s life, which is only quantitative. If the quantity of life is prolonged but the patient acquires several side effects and/or relapses, then the patient is only suffering

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