Green tea is the most common alternative medicine used by Australian women to try to avoid cancer, a survey has found.
A study of almost 900 Australian women with a family history of breast cancer found that while complementary medicine use is very high, use of alternative therapy was used by about 50% of the respondents, but just 6% were using it specifically to block cancer.
Of those who took the therapies to avoid cancer, green tea was most widely used, followed by vitamins, a soy rich diet, a low fat diet and omega-3 fatty acids.
The study was recently presented at a major cancer conference in Chicago , and is one of the biggest of its kind to investigate alternative therapy use for disease prevention.
The Melbourne cancer specialists behind the study said the results were reassuring because there was "next to no evidence" that supplements, specialist diets or physical therapies could do anything to ward off the disease.
"We would hope that women would be using these things for their overall health benefits, not for preventing cancer specifically because there are no definite studies to say that this works," said Dr Kathryn Field, an oncology researcher from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
"Thankfully that seems to be the case."
"And not only that but people often don't tell their doctors if they're taking these things and there's a good chance that they could interfere with other conventional therapies and drug treatments."
Australia 's complementary and alternative medicine industry is worth more than $2 billion and is growing fast. Advocates say more funding is needed for trials that prove the products work while opponents say the trend is potentially dangerous and call for more regulations.
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