Category Archives: Alternative Cancer Treatment

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Stress Management

5 Ways to Boost Your Spirits When Cancer Gets You Down

Get Moving
Get Moving

There’s nothing rosy about having cancer. But new cancer treatments, cancer vaccines, integrated immunotherapy, cytokine cell therapy and gene-targeted cancer therapies have increased cancer survival rates dramatically and appear to hold the keys that may lead to future cancer cures. Alternative cancer treatments offer new hope even when traditional treatments fail.

With real potential for long-term cancer remission, there is value in maintaining a positive and hopeful attitude. The connection between mind and body is not fully understood, but we do know that a positive attitude can promote healing and reduce the negative effects of stress on the immune system and general physical and mental health.

Finding ways to relieve cancer stress and maintain a positive attitude may make a difference in your ability to fight cancer successfully. When cancer gets you down, use these suggestions to boost your spirits:

  1. Move your body. To release negative emotions, do the chicken dance with your kids or tune in the soundtrack to Stomp and stomp around or drum on pots and pans.
  2. Focus your attention. Engage in a thought-provoking conversation, learn a language or take up a new hobby. New challenges force the mind to focus on the task at hand.
  3. Have a good sob. Tears have a cleansing effect on the psyche. Rent a tearjerker and cry until you’re spent.
  4. Notice the world around you. Look out the window, go for a drive or walk and tune into the world’s funny quirks and compelling beauty.
  5. Tap into your creative side. Exercising your imagination is energizing and releases joy.
Alternative Cancer Treatment, Stress Management

Beauty Programs Boost Self-Esteem of Cancer Patients

Beautiful young woman looking in the mirror.
Beautiful young woman looking in the mirror.

One of the challenges cancer patients face is maintaining a positive outlook on life. How we view the world is strongly connected to how we view ourselves. If you feel good about yourself, that positive feeling colors everything in your life. You feel comfortable in your own skin and confident that you can meet the day’s challenges with success.

There’s a strong connection between self-esteem and physical appearance. When cancer and cancer treatments strip you of energy, appetite and even your hair, it’s hard to feel beautiful which can send your self-esteem plummeting. You know how low you feel when you have a bad hair day. Well, every day is a bad hair day for cancer patients — and loss of hair is just part of the problem. Cancer and cancer treatments can turn skin sallow and pale or make it blotchy and more prone to blemishes. Fatigue can leave dark circles under the eyes, and pain can make the face look pinched.  When chemotherapy causes hair and eyebrows to fall out, the face can look blank and undefined.

To counter the loss of beauty and boost the self-esteem of cancer patients, Look Good Feel Better was founded to support and encourage cancer patients to rediscover their natural beauty. Sponsored by the Personal Care Products Foundation in collaboration with the American Cancer Society, Professional Beauty Association and National Cosmetology Association, the program sponsors beauty makeovers and esteem-building workshops through local cancer organizations. It also offers an online library of beauty tips for women and men designed to show cancer patients how to minimize the effects of cancer on their appearance.

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Cancer Care Tips

Young Adults Have Higher Risk of Oral Cancer

Fight Oral Cancer
Fight Oral Cancer

Once considered an old man’s disease, oral cancer is making a comeback; only this time it’s targeting young adults. Oral cancer is now the sixth most common cancer among young adults in their 20s and 30s. More than 40,000 Americans are diagnosed with oral cancer every year, according to the Oral Cancer Foundation. Oral cancer kills  one person every hour. More than 8,000 Americans will die from oral cancer this year alone. Even more frightening, only 57% of people diagnosed with oral cancer live past 5 years.

Oral cancer has a higher death rate than most cancers because it is difficult to detect, often fails to produce noticeable symptoms and is, therefore, usually not discovered until it has metastasized to a secondary location, typically the lymph nodes. The lag time between infection and discovery allows oral cancer to invade other local structures, resulting in additional forms of cancer. The risk of producing primary tumors at a second site is 20 times higher for oral cancer patients.

Oral cancer causes squamous cell carcinomas in 90% of cases. There are several reasons oral cancer has begun to attack people under 40.

  • The war against smoking has made chewing smokeless tobacco popular with young men and women. Marketed as a safe alternative to smoking, it may reduce lung cancer but is a leading cause of oral and pancreatic cancer.
  • Human papilloma virus No. 16 is the leading cause of oral cancer. Sexually transmitted between partners, it is also a leading cause of cervical cancer.

Alternative cancer treatments developed by Issels Integrative Oncology offer new hope for people with oral cancer.

 

Alternative Cancer Treatment, News

Why Do Some People Get Cancer and Others Don’t?

Developing Cancer
Developing Cancer

Men have a 1 in 2 chance of developing some sort of cancer at sometime during their lifetime and a 1 in 4 chance of dying from cancer. For women, the risk of developing cancer is 1 in 3 and the risk of dying from cancer is 1 in 5, according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute database.

Many factors, particularly age, sex and genetic inheritance, affect both your lifetime cancer risk and your risk of developing a specific type of cancer. But despite the risk, there are some people who do not get cancer even when a family history of cancer exists.

Why do some people get cancer while others don’t? That’s the new focus of an ongoing American Cancer Society study that was begun in 1950 and is now in its third generation. Three hundred thousand people between the ages of 30 and 65 are being enrolled in the latest phase of the study. Participants must be cancer-free when they join the study. After providing an initial blood sample and completing a comprehensive health survey, participants are sent follow-up surveys every two years.

The first generation study discovered the link between smoking and lung cancer. The second generation study begun in the 1980s linked obesity with increased cancer risk. The current study is exploring the effects of a sedentary lifestyle on cancer risk as well as the question of why some people get cancer while others do not.

The answer to that question may take decades to unravel. If you get cancer, Issels Integrative immunotherapy alternative cancer treatments and cancer vaccines may tip the survival odds in your favor.

Alternative Cancer Treatment

Holistic Techniques for Managing Cancer Pain

While revelations gained from brain imagery offer future hope for more effective pain management techniques for people who suffer from chronic pain, including cancer patients (see our previous post), taking a holistic approach to pain management currently offers the most successful pain relief.

Holistic medicine is actually a medical philosophy rather than a type of medicine. The holistic approach considers 5 important factors that affect an individual’s overall health and well-being:

  1. Physical
  2. Mental
  3. Emotional
  4. Spiritual
  5. Environment

Scientific research is beginning to prove what Issels patients and Issels cancer treatment teams know to be true from experiential evidence: that a holistic approach seeking to engage every aspect of a patient’s condition can produce amazing results, even when hope of recovery was considered slim.

Holistic techniques that have been successful in alleviating and managing cancer pain include:

  • Exercise. An essential component of pain management, exercise, even in its mildest forms, can help alleviate pain. Exercise helps to rid the body of hormones that exacerbate stress which can cause pain to flare. Exercise also helps keep muscles toned, limber and flexible which can also help to reduce physical pain.
  • Mind-body exercises. Techniques and exercises that help forge mind-body connections, such as yoga, therapeutic massage, meditation, biofeedback and acupuncture, have proven remarkably successful in helping cancer patients control pain.
  • Nutrition. Certain foods have been discovered to have pain-fighting qualities, including fruits such as red grapes and cherries, herbs and spices such as ginger and turmeric, fish, soy products and even coffee!

 

Alternative Cancer Treatment, Cancer Research

New Revelations about Chronic Pain May Aid Cancer Patients

Constant Pain and the Brain
Constant Pain and the Brain

Brain scans are revealing new insights into the nature of pain and why some people develop chronic pain after trauma while others recover. According to a recent AARP article, neuroscientists at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago have discovered that:

  • Exposure to constant pain causes the architecture of the brain to change.
  • Increased interaction between two specific areas of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, increases the probability that chronic pain will develop.

It is hoped that brain imagery may eventually lead to new techniques for chronic pain management and relief that might also help cancer patients mitigate the pain of the disease and certain treatment protocols. Until that day, the most effective pain management currently available is a holistic mind-body approach that emphasizes function over pain relief.

Pain medications are still a “first line of defense;” but “at best, people get about a 20 to 30% reduction in pain from opioid pain medications,” pain expert Dr. Richard Rosenquist of the Cleveland Clinic explained to AARP, citing the additional risk of dependence as further reason to look for other solutions to pain management.

“Now I want to know what people would like to do that they can’t do because of their pain. Then we can look for ways to help them manage the pain and do what they want to do,” Dr. Rosenquist told AARP.

The focus on function holds merit for cancer patients who must often find ways to perform everyday tasks despite their pain as they care for themselves and their families. Adopting the view “if it works for you, use it,” Issels cancer treatment specialists recommend that their cancer patients take a holistic approach to managing pain and employ a combination of pain management techniques.

Next time: Techniques for managing cancer pain