When confronted with a cancer patient, the health professional faces several challenges. Some of them involve the use of CAM. Many cancer patients will seek CAM treatment at some point in their disease trajectory, and some of them will ask their GP, surgeon, oncologist or cancer nurse about it. When giving advice about this, it is important to have thought through in which situations one should look for placebo-controlled trials and when other trial designs are more relevant.
The use of placebo in cancer research
When confronted with a cancer patient, the health professional faces several challenges. Some of them involve the use of CAM. Many cancer patients will seek CAM treatment at some point in their disease trajectory, and some of them will ask their GP, surgeon, oncologist or cancer nurse about it. When giving advice about this, it is important to have thought through in which situations one should look for placebo-controlled trials and when other trial designs are more relevant.
