Cancer Support

Cancer treatment asks a great deal of the body. Acupuncture can be used alongside conventional cancer care to help manage some of the unwanted effects of treatment and support your physical and emotional wellbeing as you move through it.

What matters most will be different for everyone. During chemotherapy or radiation therapy, the priority may be nausea, fatigue, pain, sleep, anxiety or simply helping you feel more settled between treatments. Following surgery, it may shift towards pain, swelling, restricted movement, scar tissue and restoring comfortable movement. Months or years later, treatment may focus on persistent neuropathy, hormonal treatment side effects, fatigue, disrupted sleep or rebuilding strength and confidence in your body.

Acupuncture usually forms the foundation of treatment, with manual lymphatic drainage and craniosacral therapy incorporated where appropriate. Treatment changes as you do—what is useful during active treatment may be quite different from what you need during recovery.

Herbal medicines and nutritional supplements require particular care during cancer treatment because of the potential for interactions with medications, chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Where they are considered, I work conservatively and ask that supplements used during active cancer treatment are discussed with and approved by your oncology team.

Having been through cancer treatment and recovery myself, I also understand that recovery doesn't necessarily begin or end when the medical treatment does. Finding your way back to feeling well—and sometimes finding a new version of what “well” means—can take time.

Chinese Medicine Approach to Cancer Support

Chinese medicine gives us a useful framework for understanding how your body is coping with the combined effects of illness, medical treatment and recovery.

Rather than treating every symptom as an isolated problem, we look at the pattern that is emerging for you. Where are you struggling most? What has changed since treatment began? Are you recovering between treatment cycles? How are you sleeping, eating and moving? What is happening with pain, inflammation, circulation, fluid movement and nervous-system regulation?

These findings help determine where acupuncture treatment is directed. Sometimes the priority is calming and settling; sometimes it is supporting energy and recovery, improving circulation or addressing pain and physical restriction. As treatment progresses, those priorities can change.

Research into acupuncture has identified effects on pain processing, inflammatory signalling, nervous-system regulation and other physiological pathways, and there is clinical evidence supporting acupuncture for a number of cancer-treatment-related symptoms. This makes it a useful complementary therapy within cancer care, but an important distinction remains: acupuncture does not treat the cancer itself and should not replace oncology treatment.

The goal is to help your body cope as well as it can with what it is being asked to do, reduce the burden of unwanted symptoms where possible, and help you maintain or regain the best quality of life available to you.

My Personal connection to Cancer Treatment

Supporting people through cancer treatment is quite a personal thing for me because I have been there myself. When my youngest child was only two, I found a lump that turned out to be an aggressive breast cancer. I was advised to have, and chose to go through with, surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy among other things. Alongside my medical care, I also received acupuncture, lymphatic drainage, craniosacral therapy and a variety of energy work. I found the supportive treatments made such a difference to how I felt and coped and it inspired me to adjust my clinical practice towards supporting others going through the challenging time of managing cancer in all its phases. I’m incredibly grateful to be able to say I’ve now been cancer free for many years. I still have annual checks and monitor my health closely. It’s a long and winding road.

Of course, every person’s experience of cancer is different. There are different types and stages, different treatments and medical recommendations, different side effects and different prognoses. This is where individually tailored supportive care can be a game changer.