Brain Tumor – Home and Alternative Treatment

Transcript

“So as we just talked about there, the main stay of the management of malignant gliomas include radiation, temozolomide, regiment temozolomide and also additional chemotherapies. And quite often people will, patients, patients’ family members, friends, will contact family members and will ask, you know, is there anything else that we can do to try to keep this tumor under control? And quite often people will bring up diet and also potentially additional home remedies or alternate therapies. There is no specific diet that any neuro-oncologist to my knowledge would say that this is what you have to do. Most of us will end up saying, you know, using a healthy diet, eating fairly clean. There are some medications that we use, for example, such as decadron, which can actually produce weight gain. And we actually recommend people using a fairly clean diet as a result.

If people partake in large carbohydrate intake, large amounts of sugars, that they can gain significant amount of weight, which can actually impair their functional state. In addition, some medications and some diets can actually produce diabetes. So that’s a very important issue in terms of making sure that the diet is clean. There is literature suggesting that individuals that have diabetes prior or during do have decreased benefit from the chemotherapy and potentially worse outcomes. In terms of alternate therapies, in our practice at CNS, my main concern is making sure that the individual receives the therapy that we know work. If in fact, an individual wants to use alternative therapies, we will certainly, you know, welcome that with the idea that if in fact there’s any abnormalities in their blood where their function was that we may think may be related to their alternate therapies, we’ll discuss this with them and decide together whether or not they really should continue with their alternate therapy. And people think about things such as garlic, various spices and some of those spices and particularly garlic can actually impair function of the platelets, which is something that some of the chemotherapies can decrease function and decrease the number of platelets. So that’s just one example, but the individual does have their blood work drawn on a regular basis while they’re undergoing chemotherapy. And if there’s any perturbations in their blood work that we can discuss with you, whether or not you’d want to continue or should continue with that alternate therapies.”