Breast Cancer Awareness Month is here again. Actually, it should be Cancer Awareness Month every month of the year since this ravenous disease has affected all of us on some level. So how can Acupuncture and Alternative/Complimentary healthcare medicine help to fight against this dis-ease? Let’s start by saying the gold standard phrase, “An ounce of prevention is much greater that a pound of cure.” Regular doctor checkups, eating a healthier diet, exercising more, getting adequate sleep, being very conscious about what we apply to the outside of our body, having fun, drinking purified water and practicing stress reducing techniques such as Yoga, Meditation, Tai Qi or Qi Gong are some of the essentials to living with a healthy immune system.
It’s the many slow and unsuspecting habits of life that will add up without you noticing that you are poisoning your system. Just take a simple observation of drinking 3 cups of coffee a day. Now multiply this by one year and then by 10 years. Its’ over 10,000 cups of coffee that you have put into your system over an extended period of time. Now add the 3 teaspoons of sugar per cup of coffee with the same math. Now add a plain bagel and butter with empty calories for 4 days per week with the same math above. That’s 2,000 bagels. Now that’s a lot of sugar and a lot of caffeine and a bunch of empty carbohydrates being put into your system. It’s the slow dosage intake of daily habits that need to be observed. What are you drinking daily? Liquid intake of calories is one of the most overlooked way people get unaccounted sugar in their body. Most of us know by now that Cancer feeds off of Sugar.
Acupuncture and other forms of Alternative/Preventative care which include Chiropractic, Massage Therapy, Physical Therapy, Nutritional Counseling, Psychotherapy and Herbal Medicine can all be utilized regularly with an attitude as a health maintenance, healthy check-up, healthy tune-up, or healthy support treatment plan. There is nothing like the feeling of someone taking care of your total health for an hour every week or bilateral monthly treatments and will enquire about your mind, body and spiritual aspect of your life. Having the support of someone who will listen attentively to your needs if you are in pain or discomfort on any level is paramount to staying in balance throughout a lifetime.
If Cancer has become a part of your life, please integrate both Allopathic and Complementary health systems. As I have stated many times before, having a healthcare team that empowers you, educates you and holds you accountable to build up your immune system with appropriate lifestyle modifications can help deter further accumulation of these pathological cells. Building a stronger “defense-system”, immune-system is vital to living many happy years after a diagnoses.
Anthony Cerabino