Nursing & Healthcare

Biography

Michael Frass has completed his M.D. at the age of 24 years from Medical University of Vienna. He is specialist for Internal Medicine and Internal Intensive Care Medicine. Dr. Frass is the Director of the Outpatients Unit “Homeopathy in malignant disease” at the Medical University of Vienna. He has published almost 200 papers in reputed journals and has invented the Combitube as an emergency airway.

Research Interest

The use of complementary and alternative medicine has increased over the past decade. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether homeopathy influenced global health status and subjective wellbeing when used as an adjunct to conventional cancer therapy. In this pragmatic randomized controlled trial, 410 patients, who were treated by standard anti-neoplastic therapy, were randomized to receive or not receive classical homeopathic adjunctive therapy in addition to standard therapy. The study took place at the Medical University of Vienna, Department of Medicine I, Clinical Division of Oncology. The main outcome measures were global health status and subjective wellbeing as assessed by the patients. At each of three visits (one baseline, two follow-up visits), patients filled in two different questionnaires. 373 patients yielded at least one of three measurements. The improvement of global health status between visits 1 and 3 was significantly stronger in the homeopathy group by 7.7 (95% CI 2.3 to 13.0, p=0.005) when compared with the control group. A significant group difference was also observed with respect to subjective wellbeing by 14.7 (95% CI 8.5 to 21.0, p<0.001) in favor of the homeopathic as compared with the control group. Control patients showed a significant improvement only in subjective wellbeing between their first and third visits. Results suggest that the global health status and subjective wellbeing of cancer patients improve significantly when adjunct classical homeopathic treatment is administered in addition to conventional therapy.