I am looking forward to the day when October is renamed "Breast Cancer Prevention Month". Integrative medicine doctors have an increasing toolbox of tests and natural treatments in our armamentarium that can reduce the risk of breast cancer or the recurrence of breast cancer, and I see new patients every week who want this extra help.
Prevention is the hallmark of the approach to breast cancer. Even with a woman who has been diagnosed with breast cancer, once she has completed her treatment of surgery, chemotherapy and/or radiation, she is back in breast cancer prevention mode. At that point, she is trying to prevent a recurrence of her breast cancer.
In the integrative medicine doctors' toolbox there are many approaches to help prevent breast cancer. These range from correcting estrogen dominance imbalances to detoxification of environmental estrogens from her body, using the techniques of naturopathic medicine.
At the present time, there is no integrative medicine modality for the treatment and prevention of breast cancer, with more data and research than vitamin D. There is so much information showing that this vitamin, which is really not a vitamin but a hormone, in sufficient daily doses can help protect against breast cancer.
Because for the last year I have been focusing my work in integrative medicine through the lens of vitamin D, I would like to review in this article several of the studies showing the importance of sufficient vitamin D to protect against breast cancer.
Dr Soram Khalsa
The Lappe Prospective study of Vitamin D and cancer prevention
In this study, Joan Lappe PhD, RN and colleagues looked prospectively at more than 400 postmenopausal women over a four-year period of time. In one group the women were given 1100 IU of vitamin D and 1000 mg of calcium daily. The control group did not receive this. The results of the study were that the women who took the vitamin D and calcium over the ensuing four years reduced their rate of cancer by an amazing 60%. In fact the authors looked in more detail and found that for every 10 ng/ml increase in a woman's vitamin D blood level, the relative risk of cancer dropped by 35%. These data were not limited to breast cancer but included all cancers.
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