NEWS
INTEGRATIVE MEDICINE’S ROLE
IN ONCOLOGY
Top global cancer researcher Prof Dan Burke was recently in SA to share the latest developments in integrative treatment of
chronic disease and nutrition’s role in helping prevent and treat cancer. Claire Rush McMillan, Medical Chronicle Editor, interviewed
him during his visit in Cape Town.
Prof Burke has spent most of his
life studying cancer, its causes
and detection and his research
tools are used globally. He is
Emeritus Professor of Pharmaceutical
Metabolism at Sunderland University
after serving there as Dean of Science.
He co-discovered salvestrols, a
phytonutrient found in plants, which
assists cancer patients and which
has been described as a significant
breakthrough in nutrition. This
discovery has helped scores of cancer
patients worldwide and has been used
to help develop further cancer drugs.
: What is integrative
medicine, and what is its role in
cancer treatment?
Prof Burke: Integrative medicine uses
the best of all possible approaches
to the benefit of individual patients.
It doesn’t start from a standpoint of
saying one approach is better than
another. It uses approaches that have
evidence of being beneficial. This
doesn’t necessarily mean laboratory
or scientific evidence. Experiential
evidence is also very important.
It takes into account we are all
individual. Biologically, our response
to therapies differ. If you only rely
on one type of approach, you might
not benefit from it. Integrative
medicine uses an arsenal of beneficial
therapeutic approaches. When applied
optimally, by an expert, the expert
practitioners choose the best approach
for that individual.
At its best, before therapies start,
it involves a lot of finding out by the
therapist about the individual, what are
they likely to benefit from? Not all the
experts make the same choices for the
10 MAY 2017 | MEDICAL CHRONICLE
patients. To use chess as an analogy, if
you’re going to try to take one of your
opponent’s pieces, make sure you have
several of your pieces attacking it.
This is what integrative medicine does,
especially with cancer.
Cancer is a clever beast. It’s the
cleverest devil of all the diseases. No
matter what we do to try to beat it, it
often finds a way around. If you use
only one approach, cancer finds
alternative routes. Varied approaches
help to beat it.
Take something like curcumin, which
has over 9000 peer-reviewed published
papers on its molecular science.
Curcumin can block off so many of the
alternative routes that cancer finds.
To use chess as an analogy, if you’re
going to try to take one of your opponent’s
pieces, make sure you have several of your
pieces attacking it
: Is this used in conjunction with
radiation and chemotherapy?
Prof Burke: It’s not a ‘versus’ or even
a comparison.
From the Human Genome project,
scientists now know the molecular
pathways that lead to cancer. This is
the new knowledge. For the first time
in the history of cancer research
and the development of anti-cancer
medicines, the scientists involved
are starting to really know about
cancer at the molecular level and
find selective targets. If the drugs
close off one essential molecular
pathway that causes the cancer to
grow, the cancer just turns on an
alternative pathway.
My personal belief, based on
my understanding of the scientific
literature, is that curcumin has a good
chance of stopping these alternative
pathways from being switched on.
So, if you were to give something like
curcumin alongside the clever targeted
anticancer drugs, you might just lessen
the development of resistance to the
drugs. This is using the natural to
support the pharmaceutical.
One of the greatest living cancer
researchers, Prof Bert Vogelstein,
recently wrote a paper saying that the
development of resistance to the best
medicines by cancer may hinder all the
best efforts. We need something to try
to lessen that happening.
The evidence is clear that
nutritional phytotherapy - the use of
pharmacologically active compounds,
such as Salvestrols, made from plants
that we eat in our diet, are there to
use. Three cheers for the integrative
oncologists.