(Cancer) -- Cancer patients are up to twice as likely as patients with other diseases to use unproven therapies, most likely using them to augment proven treatments rather than replace them. Those findings come from a study from researchers at the University of Washington to be published February 23 in the online edition of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The study appears in the April 1, 2004 print edition, and will be available via Wiley InterScience.

Although complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), such as chiropractic, massage therapy, acupuncture, and naturopathy, has gained increasing prominence, existing surveys characterizing patient utilization of these services preclude substantive conclusions. Moreover, insurance companies are increasingly covering such services, which could affect the use of CAM.

To address previous study limitations and explore the effect of third-party coverage, Dr. William Lafferty and his colleagues analyzed claims submitted by 357,709 claimants to two large Washington State insurance companies. The researchers compared CAM's use among cancer and non-cancer patients, its relative cost, and the factors that predicted its use.

Compared to other patients, patients with cancer were twice as likely to have used naturopathy and acupuncture. However, they were less likely to use chiropractors and equally likely to use massage therapists. Claims for CAMs accounted for more than $500 a year per patient, or 2 percent of the overall annual medical claims, indicating that CAMs augment rather than replace conventional treatment modalities.

Patients with metastatic disease or malignancies of the blood or bone marrow, who had been treated with chemotherapy, and who were female, were more likely to use naturopaths and acupuncturists. Pain was the most common presenting complaint to CAM providers.

The authors conclude, "Our data indicate that individuals with cancer were nearly twice as likely to seek care from a naturopathic physician as those without cancer. Predictors of naturopathic utilization, that is chemotherapy and metastasis, suggest that individuals who seek these services do so because of heightened illness."