I have been asked to give you an overview of the field of complementary and alternative approaches to cancer. I shall also tell you a little bit about what I do and the services I perform.

The field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) for cancer is vast. It is emerging on a global scale and draws its inspiration from many sources. These include the folk traditions of many countries, including those of Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, as well as China, Africa, India and Native Americans. But it is also increasingly integrated with the latest scientific discoveries and methods.

CAM approaches may be a simple alternative drug. But more typically, they draw on all the various systems of healing, including homeopathy, body manipulation, acupuncture and Chinese herbalism and the techniques of Indian or Ayurvedic medicine. Very important are the psychological, emotional and spiritual practices, such as yoga and Tai Chi, which have been found, after long experience, to benefit cancer patients in ways that we hardly understand. And of course diet, and food supplements, as well as exercise are basic to this approach.

My own particular interest has been in the pharmacological and biological approaches-new drugs and vaccines. Why, you may wonder, would a person like myself have to travel all over the globe to search out such treatments? Why not just sit at home, read the scientific journals, and let these discoveries come to me?

The answer is that there are really two worlds of cancer therapeutics. The first, or official, field communicates in the normal way, through peer-reviewed scientific publications and presentations at medical meetings. This is the world of Academic medicine-Schulmedezin, in German. It is an arduous study but the approach to it is quite straightforward. And indeed I, like most serious students in this field, am very interested and involved in the prodigious output from this direction.

However, as indicated, there is another source of knowledge about new cancer treatments. This is the practice of various "alternative" cancer clinics and individual practitioners. These have historically been shunned by Academic medicine and various ugly words have been applied to it. The competency, training, and motives of its practitioners have been questioned. It exists in the shadows of conventional medicine, although it is by far the older and some would say the wiser of the two.

Because it has its roots in a medical system that was overthrown by Academic medicine, its knowledge is more difficult to gain, to put to the test and to codify. But this makes it all the more interesting.

Cancer patients would be well advised to seek both academic and non-conventional approaches to their illness, to seek them simultaneously and to try to find practitioners who have a cooperative, rather than an antagonistic, attitude towards each other.

I am often asked which alternative treatments are the best. The question is impossible to answer without knowing the nature and circumstances of the person involved. Some people, for instance, are ready to travel anywhere on earth to find a treatment that suits them. Others want or need to stay close to home. Although it may seem self evident to you that patients want to be cured, this is also not necessarily the case. Patients have different goals and expectations, which may include pain or symptom relief, life extension, peace of mind, etc. It is a good idea to know in advance what you are actually seeking from treatment at a clinic such as this.

The actual techniques used in alternative clinics are pretty similar all around the world, although there are areas in which one clinic or another emphasizes more. I have been to about 20 such clinics in Europe and another dozen or so in Mexico and the Bahamas. The main techniques used at all of them are as follows:

1) New pharmacological and biological agents. The alternative clinics tend to use such things as mistletoe products, anticancer herbs, less toxic drugs, etc.

2) Immune system support. Emphasis is placed on building up, restoring and repairing a damage immune system. In the past, this was done to try and activate the body's own ability to fight the cancer. But today much of this activity is directed at healing the immune system from the effects of radiation and chemotherapy.

3) Small amounts of cytotoxic agents, including the aforementioned chemo and radiation. These are often used in conjunction with non-conventional techniques.

4) Hyperthermia. This is especially popular in Europe. It may involve local, regional, or whole-body hyperthermia. The two main schools of whole-body hyperthermia are the low-temperature and high-temperature techniques. The high-temperature techniques often require the use of anesthesia for up to seven hours. This is objected to by many pracititoners who operate from a naturopathic perspective.

5) Mistletoe. This was introduced into modern medicine by the Austrian mystic and savant, Rudolph Steiner, Ph.D. It is now the most widely used alternative cancer medicine in Germany, where its use is becoming almost universal.

6) Psychotherapy in its various forms. This generally aims to release deep-seated anger, frustration and grief, which is believed to play a role in the onset of cancer. In scientific terms this field is called psychoneuroimmunology. It can be very effective. A study at Stanford University in California showed that breast cancer patients lived twice as long when they shared their feelings and experiences with other patients.