Use of complementary and alternative medicine in lung cancer patients

For this purpose, from 2012 June to 2012 September, in Akdeniz University Faculty of Medicine Department of Internal Medicine Medical Oncology and Respiratory Medicine Clinic; we had interviews with patients who was diagnosed as lung cancer at least 3months ago, we used complementary-alternative treatment question form, Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HAD) and EORTC QLQ-LC13 questionnaires.24 women and 141 men,165 patients in total are included in this study and mean age was 62.65. Among this patients, 10 women and 51 men, 61 in total (36.96%) are CAM users for at least 1 type of CAM. Patients using alternative therapies mostly applied for religious methods, prying and herbs as CAM method. Mostly used herbal product was stinging nettle. It was found that except herbal products, patients mostly used donkey milk as a natural product. The main reason was the influence of close people around patients that lead them to use CAM. From CAM therapies Most of these patients expected provision of healing, the least expectation was feeling well psychologically. We saw that patients used CAM therapies with their conventional treatments. Most of the patients stated that they were satisfied from CAM methods, they had no side effects and they could offer this methods to other patients too, but they pointed out that it was necessary to continue conventional treatment besides CAM therapy. Also, most of the patients didn't inform their doctors about using CAM. Among the patient groups that used or didn't use CAM, we didn't find any significant difference in terms of age, sex, educational situation, the level of income, place of residence, pathological diagnosis and stage of diseases. CAM use in patients who had psychiatric support was more than the patients who didn't have this support. Also patients with anxiety used CAM more than patients without anxiety. Patients with or without CAM use had similiar life quality scores. Finally, we determined that in using of CAM, anxiety levels were much more important than sociodemographics, socioeconomical and medical factors.