Complementaire zorg

Methodological reflections on body–mind intervention studies with cancer patients

“…It is out-of discussion that these studies would require a firm design, by preference a randomized controlled study [33,37,[91][92][93]. In practice it is not always easy to realize due to e.g.…”

“…In practice it is not always easy to realize due to e.g. failing or impossible blinding, randomization problems, finding an adequate control group, and small samples [33,90,94,95]. Further, we analyzed the following six methodological themes, as presented in Box 2.…”

“…Several efforts have been made to study the effects of CAM on the well-being of patients with cancer as shown in reviews [25,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40]. Studies indicate that various interventions such as massage, guided imagery and relaxation training, have beneficial effects on the well-being of hospitalized as well as ambulatory patients with cancer [28][29][30][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51].…”

“…We will also exclude studies on therapeutic touch (TT), which is not directly at touch, but using energy exchange [68]. Studies specific about the effects of relaxation therapies are presented in reviews [33,34,37,39,61] and several studies. These studies show a decrease in emotional suppression and improvements in quality of life of in-and out-patients [30,45,[69][70][71][72], symptoms [71,73,74], fatigue [40,66], improvement in distress, mood, depression and anxiety [46,50,66,69,71,74,[75][76][77][78][79][80][81], gloomy/negative feelings [48,50,66,69,70,73,74,79,82,83], sleeping [75], pain [40,47,48,73,80,[83]…”

“…Only a few studies report about the satisfaction of the patients with the body-mind interventions [33], while satisfaction may be a prerequisite for finding effects. (5) Differential effects of interventions: A lot of studies use a combination of relaxation techniques, like visualization, guided imaginary and progressive muscle [33]. This makes it rather difficult to conclude about the specific effects of these interventions.…”