Background:
Cancer is one of the most dreaded diseases of the 21st century. Prevalence of cancers is alarmingly increasing despite various cancer prevention and early detection methods are available. Although many intensive researches are conducted throughout the world, no perfect treatment is available up to date. And in many cases the treatment itself is quite unfavourable for the patient in terms of quality of life. Ayurvedic system of medicine contributes in the palliative treatment for cancer by using immune-enhancing drugs, detoxification methods in combination with yoga and meditation. Ayurveda is supposed to add a step to the curative and palliative aspects of cancers that have resemblance with granthi and arbuda.
Aim:
Therefore the current study has been carried out to assess the quality of life of the patients under Ayurvedic cancer management.
Methods:
90 respondents were introduced for questionnaire and data was collected and analyzed according to the WHOQOL BREF instrument. Patients were assessed using the domains; physical, psychological, social and environmental well-being. Graphs were plotted according to the figures transformed by the BREF instrument equation.
Results:
The noted improvement of each domain during the period of 8 weeks considered were; physical 43.30% to 45.52%, psychological 45.42% to 47.15%, social 66.22 to 68.10%, while figures in 4th domain which is environmental remained unchanged at 52.17%.
Conclusions:
Standing on the above results it can be concluded that Ayurvedic cancer management considerably improves the quality of life of patients. Also it was found that the Physical, Social and Psychological domains were the most improved and the best preserved was the environment domain. Thus, it is suggested that if an integrated approach is carried out for the management of cancer, better results could be achieved in terms of palliative and curative aspects as well, while enhancing the quality of life of cancer patients.