Asian Medicine: How Effective is it for People With Cancer?

Samuel C. Shiflett, PhD, research director for the Continuum Center for Health and Healing, affiliated with Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, described the evidence supporting QiGong, which involves the regular practice of meditative exercises that move the body's Qi. There are QiGong hospitals in China where people with cancer practice the discipline for six hours daily for weeks. In studies conducted in China, people with advanced cancer have shown prolonged survival and tumor reduction from this practice. Even less comprehensible to Westerners are claims by QiGong masters that they can use their own Qi to reduce cancerous tumors in others. This practice called external QiGong is said to cause lifelong chronic diseases to disappear along with the cancer.

Since Westerners tend to dismiss such stories as nothing more than a placebo effect, Dr. Shiflett described several studies involving animals, who presumably would be impervious to the power of suggestion. The studies conducted in the U.S. and China involved nude mice, a hairless type of rodent used often in cancer research because they have no immune system. External Qi was directed to one group by a QiGong master, by a untrained person to a second group, and another group was left untreated.

At the end of one study, cancerous tumors were much smaller in the group of rodents treated with external Qi at the hands of a QiGong master. In another, all the mice were injected with lymphoma cells, and the group treated with external Qi had fewer cancer cells at the end of the experiment. To overcome potential bias, Dr. Shiflett said that the information about which mice had been treated was withheld from the investigators who did the final assessments of the mice as well as the statisticians who compiled the results. To illustrate the difficulties inherent in this type of research, Dr. Shiflett said that once this mouse study showed a positive effect for QiGong, one of the investigators refused to put her name on the research because it would kill her career (she has National Institutes of Health grants).

CAM research is unlikely to catch up with standard cancer treatments in terms of funding and high-quality trials. Improved quality of life, a major reason why people turn to CAM, is infrequently assessed in any trials.

Recommended Web Sites:

- Descriptions of ongoing CAM trials can be found on the Web site of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which is a division of the National Cancer Institute (http://occam.nci.nih.gov). This Web site has recently added a new feature: Visitors may now add a CAM search to the standard Medline medical literature search. For example, type the words asthma and CAM to find all the asthma studies involving treatments other than drugs.

- Click into the Food as Medicine section of www.drweil.com, the Web site of CAM practitioner, Andrew Weil, MD, author of Spontaneous Healing. Select your problem, e.g., arthritis, and find out what foods to eliminate from your diet and what foods to include.