Lung cancer: how much can herbal medicine help survival? — mortality reduction and a duration effect confirmed in 110,000+ patients

If you have been following our ongoing Cancer series of columns, you can probably already predict the conclusion — because regardless of cancer type, every cancer keeps arriving at the same conclusion with herbal medicine. The lung cancer study introduced here confirms that conclusion with the largest dataset yet, while adding one more question: how long should herbal medicine be taken?

Why lung cancer is so difficult

Lung cancer (肺癌, lung cancer) is the world's leading cause of cancer death and is an especially heavy burden in East Asia, including Taiwan and Korea. The biggest challenge is the timing of diagnosis. More than two-thirds of newly diagnosed lung cancers are already stage III or IV, where the 5-year survival rate falls to 5–14% for stage III and to about 1% for stage IV. Standard treatment — surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and targeted therapy — has advanced, but markedly raising survival in advanced lung cancer is still difficult.

What nationwide data on 110,000+ patients revealed

Published in 2017 in the international journal Journal of Cancer Research and Clinical Oncology, this study used Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) to follow 111,564 patients newly diagnosed with lung cancer between 2000 and 2009 through 2011 — a large-scale cohort study. Of these, 23,803 (about 21%) took herbal medicine alongside standard treatment, and to make the two groups comparable, propensity score matching (propensity score matching, PSM) paired 23,413 patients in each group.

The result was as expected. After adjusting for multiple factors, patients who added herbal medicine had a significantly lower risk of death than those who did not (multivariable-adjusted hazard ratio 0.62; 0.65 in the matched population; log-rank test P<0.001). Over the follow-up period, the survival curve of the herbal-medicine group stayed clearly higher than that of the non-users.

The longer it was taken, the greater the benefit

A part this study paid particular attention to was "duration of use." Dividing herbal-medicine use into shorter and longer than the median, the longer herbal medicine was taken, the lower the risk of death (longer-use hazard ratio 0.59 vs shorter-use 0.66). This benefit appeared consistently even in patients with chronic lung diseases such as COPD, pulmonary tuberculosis, and pneumonia, and regardless of whether they had surgery or distant metastases.

A consistent trend confirmed in a near-population-wide study of this overwhelming scale — over 110,000 patients — highlights the value of taking herbal medicine over the long term.

What the herbal prescriptions that improved survival had in common

What stands out is that the main prescriptions used in lung cancer were not ones that attack cancer cells directly. Prescriptions that repair the lung damage and inflammation left as after-effects of chemotherapy and radiation, prescriptions that ease cough and phlegm, and prescriptions that restore the body's immunity were the ones that ultimately produced a survival benefit. The two-way strategy of "fu zheng qu xie" (扶正祛邪) — restoring the body's own capacity to resist disease so that it can keep the cancer in check on its own — is confirmed here once again.

Together with standard treatment, and consistently

The conclusion of this large dataset is no different from other studies: adding herbal medicine to standard treatment can help the survival of lung cancer patients, and the benefit was clearer when the treatment was continued over a longer period. If you are undergoing treatment for lung cancer or are about to begin, we close by encouraging you to consult thoroughly with a Korean-medicine specialist and steadily continue an herbal medicine prescription suited to you.