A woman diagnosed with ovarian cancer becomes a believer in acupuncture after it helps her cope with the effects of surgery and chemotherapy:
One of her side effects was neuropathy, sometimes caused by chemotherapy.
As soon as treatment was completed, Goddard went on an Alaskan cruise. Then she came home and got back to work. However, she continued to experience neuropathy.
“It was causing numbness and tingling from my knees to toes and elbows to fingers,” she says. “I fell a couple of times, and it was driving me crazy.”
When she mentioned her discomfort to Moshe Frenkel, M.D., associate professor and medical director of M. D. Anderson’s Integrative Medicine Clinic, he suggested she visit Meide Liu, M.D., L.Ac., an acupuncturist in M. D. Anderson’s Place … of wellness.
“I don’t have any qualms about needles, and so I said, ‘Bring it on,’ ” Goddard says. “I don’t like to resort to any drugs unless they’re absolutely necessary.”
Within a week after her first treatment, the tingling sensation began to go away. After several weeks, her fingertips and toes were no longer numb.
Acupuncture leads to fewer drugs after recurrence
Everything was going fine until the familiar abdominal pain reared its ugly head again.
The cancer was back, this time in Goddard’s left lower abdomen, just outside her colon. Doctors suspected it had been there all along, hiding during her tests, shrinking during chemotherapy, then coming back just when she thought she was free and clear.
Goddard knew the drill: surgery, chemotherapy, losing her hair. But this time, she used acupuncture to help deal with the nausea, fatigue and pain. As an added bonus of using acupuncture, she made it through treatment with fewer drugs.
There’s also a good Q&A.
Tags: Disease by DAAN
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