Can acupuncture help cancer patients? It helps the T cells to grow to build the blood, and it supports the immune system. Acupuncture helps T cells grow to build the blood and it supports the immune system,...
Acupuncture helps T cells grow to build the blood and it supports the immune system, according to Annie Sturman, a licensed acupuncture physician and owner of Annie Sturman Acupuncture. She has been using acupuncture to treat patients with illnesses and pain for the past 20 years.
She feels Chinese medicine helps the patient because it uses a natural way to heal the patient by using herbs and changing the patient's diet. "I am treating a patient right now who has breast cancer and through supplements, herbs, diets, and exercise, we are trying to keep her immune system up so that the chemo and the radiation don't kill her," Sturman said. "Because an unfortunate side effect of the chemo and the radiation is that it breaks down on your immune system while it is killing the cancer cells."
According to the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, whose sole purpose is to promote the integration of acupuncture concepts with Western medical training, the role of acupuncture to treat cancer is to control pain from swelling, to shorten the resolution hematoma and tissue swelling, and to minimize use of medications and their attendant side effects. One form of acupuncture that is gaining popularity in treating cancer patients is called Energetic acupuncture, which combines needles with electricity and moxibustom, a form of local heating with herbs that imparts a sense of well being and accelerates patient recovery.
When cancer patients undergo chemotherapy or radiation, nausea and vomiting occurs and can be worse than the disease itself, according to Sturman. Before and after chemo or radiation, a patient is treated with this form of acupuncture, which helps the nausea and vomiting. The treatments are simple and can be administered in a quick manner. "Its effectiveness helps in minimizing the use of standard, expensive multi-drug anti-nausea regimens with their attendant side effects, given along with the chemotherapeutic agents," the Academy reports.
In acupuncture, specialists feel that any chronic disease depletes the energy level in the organism, so the depletion can be alleviated by imparting energy into the system. According to the Academy, Energetic acupuncture rebuilds the energy level to the organism as a whole and reestablishes homeostasis by re-balancing energy distribution and un-blocking energy flow. It helps treat diseased organs such as the liver, pancreas, and kidneys, including those ravaged by cancer.
However, when treating these patients, acupuncture generally takes a supportive role to western treatment and medicine. Acupuncture can help reduce the side effects, as stated earlier, but between rounds of chemo, Chinese medicine can rebuild the body from the damage done by chemo and radiation, according to some acupuncturists.
