Cancer survivors are considered to have reached a milestone when they hit the five-year mark of being declared disease-free. (Oncologists tend to avoid the word cured.) So Kathy McLaughlin was in a state of shock when, in 2004, seven years after having Hodgkin's lymphoma, she discovered that her illness had come back. The Vancouver management consultant credits integrated care–the use of complementary and alternative therapies in conjunction with conventional treatment–for helping her overcome her relapse and the accompanying emotional toll.

McLaughlin shared her story at a recent news conference at InspireHealth, formerly known as the Centre for Integrated Healing. She explained that news of her cancer recurrence came about by chance. She was seeing a doctor for a liver disorder when he found evidence of Hodgkin's–one of many types of lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system (which fights infection in the body). To make matters worse, she was in a seemingly impossible situation: because she was having problems with her liver, doctors didn't want to put her on chemotherapy, and because she had cancer, she wasn't eligible for an organ transplant. Although some people consider alternative approaches a last resort, McLaughlin said that being a patient at InspireHealth opened her eyes.

"The centre gave me an inkling that I could be in control of my own health and not surrender to the medical system," McLaughlin said at the late-April gathering, where the not-for-profit organization announced its new name. She did end up having an experimental chemotherapy treatment for her lymphoma and took steroids to treat her liver. And through InspireHealth, she turned to a variety of methods to complement her medical treatment: yoga, meditation, healing touch, music therapy, and vitamin supplementation among them. "It's a holistic perspective," she told the Georgia Straight after the news conference. "It's not just about your physical health; it makes you look at what's going on with your emotional and spiritual health."

McLaughlin has been cancer-free for two years and continues to practise meditation, which, she says, keeps her calm.

Integrative health care is nothing new, but its popularity continues to rise. The Natural Health Products Directorate's 2005 survey of Canadians aged 18 and over showed that 71 percent of respondents regularly use products like vitamins and herbal supplements. The 2003 Canadian Community Health Survey reported that 20 percent of Canadians aged 12 and up said they had visited a natural health practitioner–such as a chiropractor, massage therapist, or acupuncturist–in the past.

To help people learn more about integrated care, InspireHealth just launched its Research Information System, which compiles the latest information in holistic cancer care from around the world into a single source. The database contains about 700 abstracts, and new content will be added every two weeks. Available through the centre's Web site (www.inspirehealth.ca/), the system was funded, in part, by a $142,000 donation from the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation's B.C./Yukon chapter.

Dr. Hal Gunn, who cofounded the Centre for Integrated Healing in 1997 with Dr. Roger Rogers, said at the news conference that the research will help people with cancer better understand the options available to them.

"This gives people the information and tools they need to inspire them to take care of themselves," Gunn said. "The Research Information System will grow by about 50 articles a month as the field of integrated cancer care blossoms. We believe that integrated care improves health, provides hope, and saves lives."

Since 1997, InspireHealth (200–1330 West 8th Avenue) has treated more than 4,000 people with cancer. Among the healing methods it uses are therapeutic touch (sometimes referred to as energy healing), naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, and massage. It also offers courses in cooking, relaxation, meditation, yoga, qi gong, and drumming, as well as support groups.

The centre aims to bridge the gap between conventional and complementary health care and to support people going through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. It encourages people to be empowered and to play an active role in their treatment and healing. Its doctors work in cooperation with, and aren't intended as replacements for, patients' own oncologists.

Dr. Simon Sutcliffe, president of the BC Cancer Agency, attended the conference in a show of support for complementary care. "You do have to control cancer if you want to remove the threat to life," he said. "But that isn't the same as bringing back and restoring health. Cancer care is not just about killing…cancer cells. It's also about how you impact the system as a whole, the system being the person."

The BC Cancer Agency has a guide to "unconventional" therapies on its Web site (www.bccancer.bc.ca/). It provides information from medical, peer-reviewed literature on scores of treatments and alternative products, from astragalus, Essiac (an herbal tea), and macrobiotic diets to oxygen therapies, ginseng, and shark cartilage.

"Healthcare providers at the BC Cancer Agency believe there is a role for alternative and complementary therapies to promote improved quality of life, maintain hope, enhance feelings of control, and encourage healing within the cancer experience," the site states. "We try to adopt a respectful and compassionate attitude to our patient's [sic] questions and beliefs, and we encourage patients to share with us their decisions about complementary/alternative therapies."

According to Statistics Canada, about 160,000 Canadians will be diagnosed with cancer this year. A national organization called Prevent Cancer Now (www.preventcancernow.ca/) is working to have May recognized as "Cancer Prevention Month" in Canada. (April is Cancer Awareness Month.) The group argues that there's more to avoiding the disease than making healthy lifestyle choices, including reducing people's exposure to carcinogens in personal-care and home products, pesticides in food, and electromagnetic radiation from wireless devices and their transmitters.