Alternative Strategien in der medikamentösen Tumortherapie: sozialanthropologische Dimension

Journal/Book: Onkologie 17 (6), 24-628. 1994;

Abstract: Usually discussions on unconventional cancer treatment get bogged downin terminology. Analogies of terms lead to analogous therapeuticapproaches, often exceeding the descriptive relevance of the respectiveunderlying terms. As for every kind of therapy, mutually compatibleillness paradigms are prerequisitory for a sound doctor-patientrelationship, though. By a diagnosis and its implicit explanatory model,patient and therapist 'negotiate' a focus of therapeutic attention -e.g. morphological or biochemical illness parameters, behavioralpatterns, or meaningful attributions. Thus, diagnosis and treatmentshould be considered as a social process and as a cultural constructionof reality on the level of the therapeutic interaction, where objectivefacts count less than their respective interpretations. The choice ofexclusive, sequential or concurrent unconventional cancer treatment maybe recognized as part of a patient's coping with his menacing disease.In that process existential anxieties and feelings of helplessness - orthe doctor's therapeutic impotence - often are put under a taboo anddisplaced to a polarized opposition of 'orthodox' and 'unorthodox'cancer therapy. A pro/con approach to unconventional cancer treatmentstherefore represents more part of the problem than of the solution.

Keyword(s): Medical:cancer /therapy

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