Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) use among cancer patients / Somiyaton Mohd Dahalan @ Damuri

The Traditional and Complementary Medicine (TCM) Unit was established in three hospitals; namely, Hospital Kepala Batas in Pulau Pinang, Hospital Putrajaya in the Federal Territory of Putrajaya and Hospital Sultan Ismail· in Johor, which was approved by the Malaysian Cabinet in 2006. The unit initially provided three modalities of treatment comprising of acupuncture, Malay traditional massage and herbal therapy as adjunct treatments for cancer. Despite significant advances in treatment and the incidence of cancer in adults continuing to rise worldwide, many cancers remain incurable. One of the most feared symptoms in cancer is pain. It will affect most patients at some stage during their illness: The objectives of the study are to assess patients' beliefs and reasons on the use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) with conventional medicine in patients with cancer, to assess the relationship between demographic factors and beliefs towards using CAM, to find the relationship between beliefs and pain and to assess patients' attitudes toward pain on CAM use in cancer. Patients (with cancer) from the (TCM) Unit Hospital Putrajaya, Hospital Kepala Batas and Hospital Sultan Ismail were identified for this study. A questionnaire on CAM usage, beliefs associated with CAM usage by Rakovitch et al., (2005) were adopted and modified to answer study objectives. Patients' beliefs on CAM usage were assessed using a Likert scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). An adapted version of the Short-form McGill Questionnaire from Melzack 1987 by Bond and Simpson (2006) was used to assess pain in cancer among patients. Taking into account that the sample of the study was not normally distributed in terms of race, gender, age and site of sample taken, non-parametric statistics was used in this study to assess the relationship between demographic factors and belief towards using CAM. Correlation between beliefs about CAM usage and pain dimension was tested using the Pearson Correlation.