A friend of mine who's a doctor shared this story when I asked him about breast cancer (a family of mine was diagnosed this).
Some details might be fuzzy but enough to get the gist of it.

This lady was diagnosed with breast cancer, so the way forward is mastectomy.
She was not keen on having hers removed (thinking about her hubby ) and wanted to seek alternative treatment, against the doctors advise since time is critical in tackling cancer.

Some period of time later she came back for follow-up, this time her whole left breast is black-blue and smells rotten. She said that she's been exploring multiple alternative treatment but to no avail.
A lot of practitioners she met have made promises but came empty, so she jumped from one alternative treatment to another.
Even at this time, she still insists on saving her breast somehow, but she will not agree to the mastectomy. Wasn't much my friend could do at that point.

She never came back to the hospital after that as far as he knows.

IMO in most cases you should treat alternative medicine as the last-ditch attempt if modern medicine have failed you, not the other way around.

Mine was mostly Malay, so I don't think it's any less prevalent across race. Very sad to have the saveable cancer patients miss that window by going to alternative medicine.

Another point although off-topic is breast cancer on women. It's generally easily detectable, yet alot of them won't have them removed because of the 'value' attached to the women themselves, but that'd require a separate discussion altogether.

There is, yes it count as alternative treatment, to my knowledge the origin for malay's alternative treatment can originate from pseudoscience, indonesian root, siamese root or islamic root.

I'd trust the islamic one out of perceived knowledge of historical accumulation (same way I'd trust chinese medicine), problem is the practices are very intermingled (e.g. siamese ritual using indonesian herbs with islamic chants) that it doesn't look like anything identifiable anymore.

Personally if you ask me it's mostly just scams that it's not worth trying to sieve through to find the legitimate ones.