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Supporting Chinese-speaking cancer patients to make safe and informed complementary medicine decicions

University of British Columbia

Clinical observation indicated that there were a substantial number of Chinese-speaking cancer patients receiving care at the British Columbia Cancer Agency (BCCA) located in Vancouver, where the second largest Chinese Canadian population resides. CAM has been popular among Chinese-speaking cancer patients around the world, but little research has been done to examine the prevalence of CAM use in these patients in Canada. It was found that almost half of these patients used CAM and their preferred choice of CAM therapy was biological-based therapy that included natural health products (NHPs) and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The use of CAM is controversial because of its potential to interact with conventional cancer treatment and other medications. Due to a lack of culturally relevant CAM information and decision support intervention, many Chinese-speaking patients were using CAM without adequate support. This type of support is urgently needed to help these patients to make safe and informed CAM decisions. Knowledge about their CAM decision-making experiences and the types of CAM information and decision supports needs are required to create such interventions. A sequential multi-method research design was used for this study, which occurred in two phases: a quantitative secondary data analysis and qualitative semi-structured interviews. In this study, we found that more than 65% of the Chinese-speaking cancer patients surveyed reported to have used CAM since their diagnoses, and the prevalence of its use was significantly higher than that used by the mainstream cancer population. There were two types of CAM decision-making experience: Spontaneous and deliberate. The spontaneous decision makers relied heavily on their peers to help with decision making, whereas the deliberate decision makers gathered information from multiple sources and selected the CAM therapies that were safe and fitted their cultural health beliefs and their previous CAM use experience. In addition, the group of patients also had unique CAM information and decisions supports needs. All this newly gained knowledge would contribute to the development of future interventions to help theses patients to make safe and informed CAM decisions.

Text

2012-04-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/42129

Nursing

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/