Cohort Study

Sara Izadi-Najafabadi et al. (2025) · Integrative cancer therapies

This retrospective study compared 67 people with grade IV glioblastoma (GBM), a fast-growing brain cancer, who received integrative naturopathic care at a Canadian clinic with 243 matched patients from the U.S. SEER cancer registry. The clinic's approach added modulated electro-hyperthermia (mEHT), a radiofrequency treatment that heats tumour tissue, plus high-dose intravenous vitamin C, supplements, acupuncture and diet counselling, on top of standard surgery, radiotherapy and temozolomide chemotherapy. Standard care for GBM extends median survival only to about 14.6 months, so the authors looked for any signal that the extra treatments might add survival time. Patients had at least six mEHT sessions between 2010 and 2024, with a median of 13 sessions of up to 60 minutes each at powers rising from 50 to 140 watts. Controls were matched on age, sex, diagnosis year and whether they had surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. To avoid giving the clinic group credit for the months before they arrived, survival was counted from the start of clinic treatment (or the matched patient's start date for controls) and compared with Kaplan-Meier curves and Cox regression. Median survival from that starting point was 15 months with integrative care versus 11 months in controls, and the hazard ratio of 0.72 (95% CI 0.53-1.00, p = 0.05) sat right at the edge of statistical significance (a 28% lower hazard of death). The difference was concentrated in people who started within 120 days of diagnosis (hazard ratio 0.52, p = 0.006, roughly half the hazard of death) and in those under 50 (0.51, p = 0.009); starting later or being 50 or older showed no difference (0.98 and 0.96). Treatment began a median of 124 days after diagnosis, so these patients had already survived that long. The authors saw no seizures or other side effects. Those subgroup analyses were exploratory, unadjusted for multiple testing, and the matched groups still differed in how many had chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Because treatment was not randomised and many factors that shape GBM survival, such as tumour genetics, extent of surgery and general fitness, were unavailable, the results cannot show that the integrative care caused the longer survival. Clinic patients also paid for their own care, which may favour those with more resources, and the dose and timing of mEHT varied between individuals. The authors describe the findings as hypothesis-generating, a signal rather than an effect estimate, and call for randomised trials.

Sandra Utz et al. (2025) · Biomedicines

This prospective observational study followed 101 adults with long-standing fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) through a two-week integrative inpatient stay in Bamberg, Germany, with no control group. FMS is a chronic condition marked by widespread pain, fatigue, sleep problems, anxiety and depression, and the authors describe it as the third most common rheumatic disease. The program was built on classical European naturopathy: water-based therapies and heat, exercise, plant-based nutrition or medical fasting, herbal remedies and mind-body practices such as relaxation. The question was whether such a combined approach would ease symptoms at discharge and six months later. Of 134 patients who joined (127 women, ages 22 to 80), 101 returned questionnaires on admission, at discharge and after six months. During the stay they took part in meditative movement, physical therapy, hydrotherapy, lectures and cooking classes, and some had whole-body heat sessions or a 5-day fast on under 300 kcal a day. Pain, fatigue, anxiety, depression, stress and quality of life were measured with standard questionnaires (such as the HADS for anxiety and depression and the MFI-20 for fatigue) and compared over time with repeated-measures statistics. Overall pain intensity dropped from 71.5 to 63.0 on a 0-100 scale at discharge (a moderate effect, dz = 0.62) and was still lower at six months (64.4). Current pain fell sharply during the stay (6.56 to 4.37 out of 10) but crept back to 5.96 at six months. Fatigue improved from 71.1 to 63.3 and then partly returned (68.0). Anxiety and depression scores each fell by roughly 2.5 points at discharge and were still lower than baseline at six months. Stress and feelings of helplessness improved mainly after discharge, and mental quality of life rose between discharge and follow-up. Patients who fasted kept their pain gains at six months (p = 0.006), whereas non-fasters did not (p = 0.062), although this difference was borderline (interaction p = 0.050) and not randomised. The results come from an uncontrolled, single-centre sample in which a quarter of the participants did not complete the six-month questionnaire, so the changes cannot be attributed to the program alone. More than half the patients reported obstacles to continuing the methods at home, such as lack of time and exhaustion. The authors call for randomised trials with long-term follow-up and propose a follow-up day-clinic programme to help consolidate the learned self-management skills and everyday routines.