I was told pretty clearly by my medical oncologist that anything that was thoguht to have antioxidant properties was not something I should take during rad and chemo. beofre rad and chemo it was fine. The reason he gave was pretty simple. There's not enough good experiemntal research to show one way or the other what effect most of these vitamins/supplements have during treatment but the theory about how anioxidents work in gerneal is that they slow or stop the growth of cancer cells. However, both radaition and chemo are effective at killing more cancer cells than helathy cells precisely *because* cancer cells tend to grow much faster (and therefor are less resistant to damage from rad or chemo) than healthy cells. So what you may do by taking these things udring treatment is making the treatment less effective at killing the caner cells more so than regular cells.

I've dpone a lot of reading on a lot of supplements but that simplpe explanation made a lot of sense to me. Of course now I'm back to putting whatever supplements and vitamins I can get down my tube into my body because now is time for healing and there's researc that at least strngly suggests they help with that.

Oh, except not Vitamin E which has been shown to cause a higher liklihood of recurrence (and that finding scares me because who knows about some of this other stuff).