What Is Supplemental Therapy?
Supplemental therapy is treatment intended to be used in addition to conventional therapy. Examples of supplemental therapies include visual imagery, special diets, vitamins, exercise, counseling, prayer, humor, biofeedback, relaxation, and meditation.
Proponents believe that adding supplemental therapy to your conventional cancer treatments may promote your physical and emotional comfort, enhance your response to conventional therapy, speed your recovery from cancer treatment, and possibly improve your chances against your cancer. The role of supplemental therapy in strengthening the immune system is being evaluated.
Supplemental therapies are never intended to be used as the only therapy when conventional therapy is available. Many people turn to supplemental therapy alone when they have completed conventional therapy and there is no available additional conventional therapy for keeping them in remission. Other people use supplemental therapy alone, with the hope of controlling their cancer, after all conventional therapies have failed.
Visualization is the process of imagining a desired effect or outcome in your mind. Before winding up to throw, baseball pitchers visualize the ball flying through the strike zone. They even visualize throwing strikes while they warm up in the bullpen or relax at home in the evening. Somehow this visualization helps their muscles perform when they are on the mound.
You visualize for healing by imagining your body fixing the body’s problem. If you had surgery, you can visualize the incision healing. If you had chemotherapy or radiation, you can visualize he treatment damaging and killing cancer cells, and your white cells killing and clearing away cancer cells.
Your visualization may be fairly realistic if you know what your cancer cells and white cells look like. Visualization is felt to be just as effective if you use simplistic images or even symbols. You may] visualize white dots (your white blood cells) gobbling up black dots (your leftover cancer cells or any new cancer cells) the way Рас-Man eats the computer dots.
Visualization can be even more abstract. You may imagine J wave (the cancer treatment and your body’s immune system) washing over a beach and then retreating to the ocean, carrying away any debris (cancer cells).
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