00:00Well, another appeal for medical tourists to China is, of course, traditional medicine therapies.
00:05An estimated 300,000 foreign visitors travel to China annually for TCM-related treatment and wellness programs.
00:14And TCM can be used as a supportive treatment during cancer care to help reduce side effects from chemotherapy and
00:21help with pain relief.
00:22This model is widely used in China and there's a growing interest in integrated oncology in the West.
00:28Nina Fuller-Shevelle is a leading integrative medicine doctor in the UK.
00:34Integrative oncology is really about having the best of the best and marrying both worlds.
00:39So it's about combining the best of standard of care, which includes surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, cell therapies,
00:47the whole gamut of conventional cancer treatment with additional support.
00:52And that might include nutritional and lifestyle modifications, natural products, mind-body support and complementary therapies.
00:59What aspects of traditional Chinese medicine can help with symptoms and side effects of cancer treatment and how do they
01:06work?
01:07And we know the Society for Integrative Oncology, or SAO, has created guidelines that cover things like pain management, anxiety
01:15and depression and fatigue support.
01:17And when we're looking at these particular guidelines, we know, for example, for pain, there's a strong recommendation for acupuncture
01:23in relieving pain that breast cancer patients might experience while on hormone therapy.
01:29And we should also be offering that for patients who might be experiencing more general cancer pain and musculoskeletal pain.
01:36In terms of how things work, I mean, acupuncture has a myriad of ways of working.
01:41We know there's some local effects that happen at the needle in terms of pain, painkiller, natural painkiller relief.
01:48But we also know that it acts on the brain and it actually communicates with the brain, influences the pathways
01:54that can dampen the feelings of pain peripherally in the body.
01:58What lessons can Western medicine take from traditional medicine?
02:04I think it's a bi-directional bit of learning, really, that we have to do.
02:08I think traditional medicine has one of its strongest suits is recognizing the whole human being.
02:13And actually, we know that Lancet Oncology Commission has really called it a human crisis in cancer care.
02:19We are very good at treating tumors.
02:21We're not very good at treating people.
02:23And I think that a whole person approach, looking at the person and looking at prevention all the way to
02:30on treatment support through to survivorship care, is something that traditional medicine does very, very well.
02:35But I also think it's the bi-directional relationship goes the other way.
02:39And I think it's really important that traditional medicine is also held up to rigorous science.
02:44So we really understand what works for us in our modern day right now.
02:48So I think the two together, working in synergy, is the most powerful approach.
02:54How do you see integrated health care evolving over the next decade, for example?
03:00Wow, what a wonderful question.
03:02So I would say the first thing that we really need to do is really follow the path that WHO's
03:07strategy sets out for us.
03:09We need to make sure that we are looking at how we regulate traditional medicine well, how we standardize our
03:15approaches to make sure that the highest standard of care are being delivered.
03:20We need research.
03:21We need funding for that research.
03:23In fact, less than 1% of global health care research funding goes into traditional complementary and integrative medicine.
03:30And that really needs to change.
03:32And I love to see China's investment in this.
03:35We also need to be thinking about how do we practically integrate this within the biomedicine.
03:39It's about working really closely together.
03:41And that's about implementation research and supporting that across the world so that people can have access to this sort
03:48of care.
03:48So we really need to follow, I think, the WHO traditional medicine strategy and the research strategy to really see
03:55this evolve and become a part of just good medicine.
03:58For me, integrative oncology isn't actually something that I want to be integrative oncology in 10 years' time.
04:04I want it to be oncology.
04:06It needs to be just simply good medicine.
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