CAM Information

Your Opinion Matters: NCI Listens and Learns

In summer of 2006, the NCI's Office of Liaison Activities (OLA) approached OCCAM about participating in the NCI Listens and Learns program, a program sponsored by the NCI and the NCI's Director's Consumer Liaison Group which allows advocates and interested members of the public to participate in an open dialogue with NCI on a range of cancer research topics. OCCAM decided to develop two questions regarding the fourteen PDQ® cancer CAM information summaries (patient-versions) for participants to comment about:

• Is the type of information provided in the CAM cancer information summaries for patients useful?
• Is there a CAM therapy for which you would like to see a summary written?

These questions were posted for discussion during the months of August and September of 2006. Six advocacy groups participated and twenty-four comments were submitted by the public. Next, an executive summary of the comments was created and posted. The analysis of the comments showed four major themes of responses: usefulness of CAM-related information summaries, topics for future CAM-related information summaries, CAM-related research topics, and use of CAM in practice.

OCCAM reviewed the executive summary and was happy to see that most of the participants felt as if the PDQ cancer CAM summaries were helpful. In addition, OCCAM shared the executive summary with the PDQ Cancer CAM Editorial Board, a board independent of NCI that manages and maintains the summaries. The Board's input has been included in addition to the NCI response that has been posted online.

NCI’s CAM Annual Report for Fiscal Year 2005 Available

The Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM) is pleased to announce that the recently released publication, NCI's Annual Report on Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Fiscal Year 2005, is now available electronically on the OCCAM Web site. This report is the first of its kind for the National Cancer Institute and was created in order to share with its many stakeholders the various contributions and activities related to cancer CAM research and information dissemination that NCI supports.

NCI’s Annual Report on Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Fiscal Year 2005 features an analysis of NCI's CAM research portfolio and highlights examples of cancer CAM communications, training, conference, and research activities.

To view this report please visit: www.cancer.gov/docs/annual_report/CAMAnnualReportFY2005.pdf.

New Cancer CAM Summaries Posted

Several new and updated cancer CAM PDQ® summaries have been added to the OCCAM Web site. Recognizing that there are different audiences seeking information on CAM, there are two types of CAM PDQ® summaries, patient and health professional versions. Each peer reviewed summary, generated by a comprehensive literature review, contains background information and relevant information about preclinical and clinical research on the therapy of interest. The patient version summaries are written in question and answer format to assist patients in finding direct answers to the questions that they may have regarding a particular therapy.

New summaries for patients include:

1. Milk Thistle
2. PC-SPES
3. Selected Vegetables/Sun's Soup
4. Aromatherapy and Essential Oils

New summaries for health professionals include:

1. Gerson Therapy
2. Spirituality (revised)

CAM PDQ® cancer information summaries are available via the NCI Web site at http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam.