Complementary and alternative care within cancer care.

In this paper the authors will describe the emergence of CAM within cancer care by summarizing developments in research, practice and delivery, and outline the context within supportive and palliative care and highlight the parallels within the emergence of this specialty. It will be illustrated how the users, patients and their families are increasingly shaping service, provision and describe initiatives, both regional and national, which put the patients' perspective at the heart of decision making for the future CAM research and service delivery. The paper makes an attempt to identify and discuss briefly integrative medicine and describe the variety of forms and venues in which integrative medicine can be practiced by oncologists to treat cancer patients.