Whether you are newly diagnosed with cancer or have been dealing with the disease for awhile, you can empower yourself with reliable tips to find the best of cancer care. Follow these steps to boost your quality of life and even improve your survival:
1. Maintain self-care. Before starting your cancer research, find ways to relax and resource yourself. You must feel some calm to effectively evaluate options, navigate cancer, and live your life to the fullest.
2. Identify forms of support. Nobody goes through cancer alone. Share your needs with family and friends knowing that people have different ways of giving. Ask for help and be ready to receive. Also seek knowledge about health and healing through cancer from new cancer friends and other supportive cancer resources.
3. Learn about and pursue integrative cancer care. Educate yourself to understand that integrative cancer care optimally tends to look at you as a whole person: body, mind, and spirit, including social and environmental health. Explore more about integrative cancer care and where you need more support.
4. Consider consulting with cancer patient navigators. Services through cancer patient navigators can help with research of cancer treatment options along with other components of integrative cancer care. Find someone with this expertise.
5. Ask good questions to evaluate cancer treatments and providers. Take the time to create a list of questions for your research process. Questions include the safety and efficacy of cancer treatments, assessing evidence, qualifications and experience of cancer providers, and other important areas.
6. Research your cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment options. Explore cancer resources through non-profits, other organizations and businesses, government resources, online databases, and journals. Consider cancer clinical trials too. Apply your questions to evaluating cancer treatments and providers.
7. Research oncologists and choose one. Learn about oncologists with expertise in your cancer diagnosis, especially since recommendations about cancer treatments often vary. Identifying several oncologists will allow you to collect multiple opinions. After consulting with several providers and confirming your diagnosis, select an oncologist. Know that only a limited number of oncologists practice varying degrees of integrative cancer care.
8. Find whole body health care providers. Even if you choose an oncologist practicing some aspect of integrative cancer care, you will need integrative providers with expertise in cancer to help support your whole physical body through integrative medicine systems such as naturopathy, functional medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and ayurveda.
9. Tend to your mind-body wellness. Caring for your mental and emotional inner life supports your health and healing. Use techniques tending to mind-body balance and vitality. Meditation, breathing, imagery, movement, creative expression, massage, biofeedback, psychological support, and other approaches can be done alone, in groups, and/or with providers.
10. Nurture your spirit. Spirituality often becomes more prominent when dealing with cancer. As spiritual questions surface, opportunities for new knowledge about religion and spirituality emerge. Seek spiritual support within yourself and from others.
11. Make your environment clean and green. With nearly 80,000 potential environmental carcinogens today, take steps to safeguard against contaminants. Clean up your environment using non-toxic products for personal care, household cleaning, water and air purification, as well as protection against other everyday exposures.
12. Connect with your passions and purpose. Give your attention to your passions and purpose. The people, activities, work, places, and anything else connected to your core will help ground you and give strength as you navigate any challenges. Focusing your attention on what you love supports your vitality.
Continue to support your health and healing in these and many other ways. Know that you are always in movement and can make changes whenever necessary. Believe in yourself.
Jeannine Walston is co-founder and Executive Director of EmbodiWorks at www.embodiworks.org, a non-profit organization focused on creating a better world by providing definitive, reliable educational resources and supporting advocacy focused on integrative cancer care to reduce cancer risk and improve cancer-related survival, quality of life, and whole person health care. Jeannine is a cancer survivor with extensive experience in cancer education and advocacy, health care policy, and both conventional and integrative cancer care through work in the U.S. Congress, government agencies, cancer non-profit organizations, and health care practices.