It’s widely accepted that when diagnosed with cancer, an immediate sense of doom and urgency shortly follows. Understandably, given both the stressful and emotional panic often follows, most of us would panic, and with the assumption of having to immediately start a combination of harsh anti cancer therapies. Thankfully, following such a diagnosis, there’s often time to step back, breathe, and take time to consider all of your treatment options. When this is the case, as it can often be, a more clear understanding of wholism and health support (instead of pending doom and darkness) can be had. When a logical and calculated approach is taken, it’s much easier to start becoming more aware of, better understand, and consider the massive adjunctive potential of adding integrative cancer therapy to your standard treatment approach.
What Is Integrative Cancer Care?
Chemotherapy is scary, there’s no way around it. Nobody wants it, people fear it, and the potential side effects can be cruel. Thankfully, chemotherapy and other standard cancer therapies can be extremely helpful in many cases of cancer. This being said, what’s often missed in the general cancer approach is that of integrative cancer care. Integrative cancer care is the medical approach to cancer that combines both conventional and complimentary care together. More and more research, clinical benefit, and general awareness of combining both natural and standard therapies is proving outright beneficial. What integrative cancer care is not about however, is choosing ‘natural’ medicine over conventional care, but is about integrating the best of both in order to provide patients with the most effective and useful treatment support. Although conventional research has not yet fully validated every aspect of integrative medicine (well then again, nor has it fully validated all standard therapies either), it has validated a lot of it. The therapies it has yet to fully appreciate are mostly due to the fact that measuring the outcomes of some integrative medical treatments can sometimes be much more complex when simply trying to fit into the standard parameters of research. Regardless, what is known is that concrete evidence is continually evolving to support the augmented benefit of simply not just moving forward with standard medical cancer therapies (like chemotherapy, radiation, surgery), but to also prioritize the value of approaching treatment from a more logical and realistic position by integrating the best of what medicine has to offer; integrative cancer therapy.
What Are The Benefits of Integrative Cancer Therapy?
So when dealing with cancer, what are the true benefits of engaging in an integrative treatment approach? For starters, integrative cancer therapy supports the entirety of health of a patient with cancer. Although standard cancer treatments provide cytotoxic (cancer killing) ability, it does so at the cost of overall health of the patient. Using an integrative medical approach allows for both cancer killing potential as well as being able to optimize a patients health. Along similar lines, an integrative medical approach is often necessary to help patients endure the harsh realities of standard cancer therapies. Using a single nutrient or natural medicine can often be enough to help a patient suffering through chemotherapy the safe opportunity to hugely reduce, or even banish any negative side effects induced by these toxic drugs.
What Other Benefits Can Integrative Cancer Therapy Offer Alongside Standard Treatment?
The thing about Integrative cancer therapy is that it works. It’s benefits often speak for themselves. Although nothing is guaranteed, integrating a combined approach will fall nothing short of stacking the anti cancer odds in your favour. In terms of additional benefits (to whats already been mentioned) alongside standard treatment, integrative cancer therapy can: improve multiple aspects of quality of life (such as more energy, less fatigue, less pain, better digestion and appetite, less nausea, better sleep, improved mental clarity), improve overall survival, improve survival standards, optimize your health over the course of active standard treatments (which is often unheard of!), synergize and actually improve the response of cancer cells to conventional therapy, improve immune system and blood counts, and potentially lessen the dose of chemotherapy needed. In addition, although complimentary medicine is not approved as a singular mode of therapy on its own, its therapies possess huge anti cancer potential, which has repeatedly proven to safely work alongside current conventional treatment therapies.
The options that integrative cancer care has to offer, stretches far beyond standard medicines current acceptance of its worth. The ironic thing here is that its a medical approach thats used successfully in controlled medical settings across the globe, however has not yet been fully caught up to within standard cancer care here in North America. If you haven’t considered integrative medicine as part of your cancer treatment approach, it’s time to talk to your medical doctors about adding a naturopathic integrative cancer focused doctor to your team.