A Pharmacist's Guide to Integrative Therapy for Breast Cancer

This is a comprehensive guide to integrating supplements into breast cancer therapy written by a pharmacist and breast cancer survivor. The author talks about her journey from diagnosis to treatment plan, to finding integrative therapies that work for her. Every medication and supplement that enters the body has to be metabolized before it can leave the body. Medications and supplements often share common liver metabolism pathways and this is where interactions can occur. The author seeks to guide the reader through the process of selecting supplements that won't interact with their cancer therapy medications since an interaction could result in either cancer medication concentrations that are too high, causing side effects, or concentrations that are too low, resulting in loss of cancer medication effectiveness. There is a chapter that describes how and why these interactions can occur and the potential hazards of adding supplements without knowing how they are metabolized and if they may interfere with metabolism of the reader's cancer medications. Different types of supplements are covered in each chapter. This isn't a comprehensive book of supplements and the author's goal isn't to recommend specific supplements. Some of the research about different supplements is reviewed as well as some potential caveats to their use. References are provided for those who want to delve deeper into studying supplements. At the end of each chapter there is a table that contains the supplements discussed in the chapter along with the metabolic pathways they can affect. Since each patient is on a different medication regimen, they can ask their medical oncologist or pharmacist for the metabolic pathways their medication(s) use and in that way, can look at the charts to find supplements that are safe to use with their cancer medication(s). The goal is to improve quality of life while safely implementing supplements as part of integrative therapy.