The Mount Zion Health Fund provided funding to the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine (OCIM) for an innovative demonstration project to provide a Perioperative Integrative Medicine Service (PIMS) to cancer surgery patients at Mount Zion Hospital. PIMS is a physician-led multidisciplinary consultation service that provides acupuncture and massage treatments to post-operative cancer surgery patients. Currently, the primary indications for receiving PIMS include symptoms of pain, anxiety, or nausea and vomiting.

This project aims to perform a pilot study to evaluate the PIMS program and collect data to estimate effect sizes for a full-scale randomized, controlled clinical trial proposal. It will assess the feasibility and acceptability of performing the planned study measures in both an intervention and control group. For effect size estimates, the primary outcome will be pain severity and secondary outcomes will include nausea severity, number of vomiting episodes, mood, patient satisfaction, and length of hospital stay. We plan to enroll 120 patients prior to cancer surgery and randomly assign them in a 2:1 ratio to either the PIMS intervention plus usual care or usual care alone. All patients randomly allocated to the intervention group will receive massage and acupuncture treatments on post-operative day #1 and 2. Baseline data will be collected prior to surgery at the pre-operative anesthesia evaluation at the PREPARE clinic at MZH and on post-operative day (POD)#1 (prior to the intervention). Follow-up data will be collected after treatment POD#1 (within 1 hour of treatment), POD#2 (within 1 hour of treatment), and POD#3. On day of discharge or on POD # 3, whichever comes first, patient satisfaction data will be obtained. Length of hospital stay will be obtained from chart review and electronic records (STOR database). The PIMS program is focused on symptom management and is not designed to affect the course of cancer prognosis. Consequently, any adult patient regardless of cancer diagnosis that is undergoing cancer surgery and a minimum of 2 days of hospitalization at MZH will be eligible for the study, although the study analysis will group types of surgery to determine if there is evidence of different effect sizes related to type of surgery.