Use of Alternative Medicine — A Marker for Distress?

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Abstract
In this issue of the Journal, Burstein and colleagues give us surprising new information about women who begin to use alternative medicine after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer.1 The investigators studied 480 patients with newly diagnosed early-stage breast cancer and found that 28 percent of them began to use alternative medical therapies as an adjunct to conventional therapy. There is much confusion about the definition of alternative medicine,2 but the main point is that the women chose to use several (an average of 2.5) different forms of alternative medicine, including psychological and healing therapies,3 in addition to the conventional . . .