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Investigating complementary therapies

Complementary therapies are used alongside conventional medical treatments.

Many women use complementary therapies because they want to play a more active role in their breast cancer management, to manage stress and help alleviate the side effects of conventional treatment.

To date, there has been a lack of strong scientific evidence to support the benefits, or otherwise, of these therapies. This has led to confusion over the effectiveness and safety of some treatments and therefore more scientific research in these areas is needed.

Breakthrough has recently developed a funding programme to support research investigating the use of complementary therapies in breast cancer. The programme will focus on alleviating the side effects of conventional treatments.

In developing our programme we recognised that there are many challenges in designing complementary therapy research. On 14 December 2006 we held an important seminar to discuss and tackle these issues.

In addition, we conducted a survey to find out more about which complementary therapies are used by breast cancer patients and why.

In October 2007, we announced the launch of ACU.FATIGUE, the first study to be funded as part of our complementary therapy research programme.

Find our more about our seminar, the results of our survey and ACU.FATIGUE:



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