Meetings

Join Us at the OCCAM Monthly Lecture Series

OCCAM invites you to attend the OCCAM Monthly Lecture Series, in which notable researchers present their work in CAM and cancer. These lectures occur every second Wednesday of the month and are open to the public. As examples, previous lecture topics have included traditional medicine as prevention of colon cancer, herbal medicine for chemoprevention of lung cancer, and ascorbic acid in cancer treatment.

Dr. Jin-Rong 'Joseph' Zhou of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will be presenting in September. The title of Dr. Zhou's talk will be “Soy Phytochemicals and Tamoxifen Combinations on Breast Cancer Progression.” Subsequent topics and speakers as well as archived videocasts of several past lectures will be posted on the OCCAM Web site at http://cam.cancer.gov//news_lectures.html.

A Cancer CAM Primer for Oncology Nurses

The Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) sponsored its first all-day session on cancer CAM at its 31st Annual Congress in Boston, Massachusetts in May 2006. Presenters Georgia Decker, ONS President, and Commander (CDR) Colleen O. Lee, Practice Assessment Program Coordinator from OCCAM, developed the session in response to ONS members' requests for comprehensive national programming. They were joined in the afternoon by a third presenter Marion Bergan Irwin, a licensed acupuncturist from Albany, New York. The content was tailored to nurses whose practices span from community, hospital, to research-based facilities involving the care of cancer patients within acute, chronic, and supportive care settings.

The Cancer CAM Primer for Oncology Nurses was split into morning and afternoon workshops. The morning educational workshop included topics such as the historical role of CAM and care of the whole person; complexities surrounding certification, reimbursement, ethics, and legal considerations in the delivery of CAM therapies by nurses and non-nurses; current evidence-based use of conventional and CAM modalities for symptom management; and the potential impact of herbs and supplements with cytotoxic agents. Demonstrations and hands-on learning about acupuncture; various herbs, vitamins, and biologics and how to read supplement labels; and searching CAM information databases comprised the three afternoon workshops.

As a result of the success of this year's CAM Primer, a cancer CAM supplement will be submitted to the Society's two peer-reviewed journals The Oncology Nursing Forum and The Clinical Journal of Oncology Nursing. In addition, a pocket guide highlighting the evidence-based conventional and CAM interventions for the symptoms discussed in the Primer session will be published. “If all goes well, our proposal to repeat the CAM Primer at the 2007 Congress will be accepted. We plan to offer an advanced tier to the session that will provide more experiential sessions,” said CDR Colleen Lee.

Featured Scientific Meetings