Even though almost every patient reports some pain with mesothelioma, the amount of pain varies. Some patients remain active and vital, which helps reduce the pain and slow the progression of the disease. Pain often prevents the patient from doing this, so quality of life diminishes as their health and vitality disappears.
Remaining active and eating right is one way to help fight the pain of mesothelioma. While all the chemotherapy, radiation treatment or simply the pain might deter you from a proper diet as well as getting the proper amount of exercise, in order to live better, you have to try to eat right and exercise. When you exercise, you improve your stamina and mood, according to most studies.
Fighting back may literally involve training like a prizefighter. Of course, you may not have the same vigorous workout but considering physical shape and stamina, there is no difference between you and the man hoping to win the championship. You are Rocky Balboa, fighting against the dreaded disease and knowing you’ll come out victorious.
Endorphins
The reason exercise helps is two fold. The first is the endorphins you produce when you exercise. Endorphins are chemicals in the brain. They are neurotransmitters that signal the nervous system and come from the pituitary gland, then sent to other parts of the body. These neurotransmitters interact with the opiate receptors in the brain and make your body think that there’s no pain, similar to the effect that morphine or codeine has only without the side effects or addiction.
Sometimes your body produces them naturally in response to stress, physical activity, positive mental attitude or certain types of food. Increasing your level of physical activity to the point of releasing endorphins might not be as difficult as you think, particularly if you’re out of shape.
One simple way to improve your cardiovascular system and stimulate the production of endorphins is the burst type of exercise. The burst exercise involves 30 to 60 seconds of 90 to 100 percent of your maximum ability followed by 30 to 60 seconds of low-impact recovery exercise. You simply do repeat the steps four to six sets every other day to see improvement. In between, you can do strength training, flexibility training or resistance training.
Burst exercising is far better for your body than taxing it for hour long runs. After long strenuous cardio-vascular workouts, your body has a lower resistance because the strenuous workout affected the immune system. This is something you definitely don’t want to happen if you have any disease, let alone mesothelioma. Riding a bike leisurely for a mile or two isn’t a strenuous workout. Riding that same bike for 10 miles at top speed is.
Using burst training, you adjust your maximum exertion until you reach your peak, but only for 30 to 60 seconds. In the beginning, you’ll want to use the shorter time, 30 seconds. Simply run in place, sprint or do jumping jacks for 30 seconds and follow it with a walk, squats or wall push-ups for thirty seconds for four sets initially. You can increase your time and the number of sets. However, don’t do more than 10 sets a day, every other day. Your body needs repair time in between.
The endorphins you release not only improve your appetite and reduce pain, they improve your immune system too. You’re going through a lot of stress in addition to the pain you feel, the endorphins from exercise help to lower both the stress and the pain. Even if you’re bed ridden, you can lay in bed and do some form of exercise that makes your heart beat faster and taxes your energy. Find a method to exert yourself based on your condition. You might find that once you begin, you’ll slowly increase your stamina and ability to do exercise.
The second reason exercise helps overcome pain is also two fold. When you’re participating in something you enjoy, you take your mind off your problems. Some people don’t realize that dance is a wonderful form of burst exercise. You can listen to the music and dance vigorously but when you hit 30 to 40 seconds into the song, slow down to swaying and slow foot movements, after 30 seconds, go back to a vigorous disco/rock and roll or other movement. Use the same song and note the first time you listen, where the thirty-second interval hits.
After that, just focus on the music and for those few minutes, you have no problems blasting your brain, just the lyrics and rhythm of the song. If you love biking, or some other sport, that also helps take your mind off your illness.
Sexual activity
One other exercise most people don’t think about is sexual activity. Sex not only provides a workout, it also takes your mind off your illness and produces more endorphins than other forms of exercise. If you made a scale of one to five for the release of endorphins, heavy physical exercise would be a 2 to 4 on the increase scale. An orgasm would be a 5!
The other reason it helps, is simply the overall strength you’ll gain from exercise. Strength equals health and vitality. You can’t be Rocky Balboa if you’re wimpy, however, even the weakest of individuals can become the fighter by training in some way every day. Mesothelioma isn’t for sissies. It’s tough and you have to be just as tough as it is.
Chilli
You can increase the amount of endorphins with diet, too. Chewing chili peppers burns your tongue and the body wants to protect it. It sends endorphins through your body and to your tongue as well. While the amount is less than exercise, it’s a great way to get a little pain relief when you need it most.
Diet plays a huge role when you’re fighting the pain of mesothelioma. Often the pain begins because the tumor grows large and presses on vital organs. You can use diet as a method of slowing the tumor growth and easing the pain.
Antioxidants
Many studies show that fresh fruits and vegetables contain powerful antioxidants that help reduce the risk of cancer. Different studies show that they actually might slow tumor growth or shrink tumors. If you don’t own a juicer, buy one. Reducing fresh fruits and vegetables down to the juice allows you to intake more without filling you beyond capacity. Kale is another cancer fighting vegetable that blends easily into any drink.
Instead of a lunch, consider a large glass of juice from carrots, broccoli, tomatoes and other mixed vegetables. Use a lot of colorful vegetables and fruits because some of the most helpful chemicals in them are in the pigment. Blend in the seeds of the apples and other fruit. They’re good for you too. A juicer makes certain you receive all the benefits. Remember, scientists had better results from patients that ate the whole foods rather than simply supplementing their diet with pills.
Deep purple grapes, cranberries, blueberries and acai berries contain powerful antioxidants. You may have heard of red wine helping with heart disease or cancer. That’s because the resveratrol, the pigment that gives these fruits and vegetables the color. You can also find resveratrol in peanuts, even though they aren’t one-bit purple, and dark chocolate or coco powder. Adding dark chocolate to your diet can also elevate your mood. Make sure it’s the dark chocolate and not milk chocolate. Some businesses now promote “healthy chocolate.”
Flaxseed
Other healthy additions to your diet are flaxseed oil and ground flaxseed. Dr. Budwig, a biochemist, created a diet made of quark, a type of cottage cheese made without rennin, flaxseed oil and ground flax seed. In patients that couldn’t sit up because of the cancer, she added champagne to get the effects into the system faster. While there’s debate as to whether the diet shrank tumors, the fact is, it can’t hurt to add it to your diet. If it brings relief from pain, all the better and there’s no side effects.
Sugar
Avoid sugar as if it’s the plague. Cancer cells love sugar, refined wheat and other processed foods. These foods feed the cancer. Clean out your body and your cupboards of processed foods. Add plenty of spices to your shelf and to your foods. While the spices such as pepper might help you fight the pain, other spices can help strengthen your body and some of them can help you attack the cancer head on.
Turmeric
Turmeric, for instance, is not only good for Alzheimer’s, as discovered before, but scientists also found that the curcumin in turmeric not prevents damage to the gene that produces enzymes, which stops the growth of tumors but also can reverse the damage causes by asbestos to the gene. Ginger also provides soothing relief and helps fight your cancer.
Green tea
Another soothing drink that helps you relax and eases the pain is green tea. Green tea not only helps comfort you, it also has cancer-fighting properties that can make you stronger and reduce the growth of the cancer cells. Simply slowing the development can reduce future pain. Fighting the cancer and fighting the pain might seem like a dramatic alteration of lifestyle, but doing it naturally and being able to function without the side effects of painkillers makes it worthwhile. It’s never too late to alter your lifestyle.
Family support
Mesothelioma can be quite painful to most patients. That’s why mesothelioma family support is so important. Overcoming the pain can help the patient have a higher quality of life and a higher quantity of life. By remaining as active as possible and following a good nutritional regimen, the sufferer from the disease helps his body fight back at the cancer and in doing so, extend the prognosis from the doctor. However, fighting the pain isn’t easy and often unattainable without the aid of physicians, mesothelioma alternative treatment and mesothelioma palliative care.
Pain
Pain is often one of the main reasons that people seek a doctor when they have mesothelioma. Often the disease brings pain in the chest or abdomen but if it spreads to other parts of the body, the pain extends to those areas also. As the tumors grow from the disease, the pain becomes more severe.
Just as a sore stomach can occur if too much gas builds in it, that’s a simplified version of how the pain occurs with mesothelioma. The tumor can cause a build-up of fluid in the chest or abdomen. This fluid and the expanding tumor slowly crush the vital organs. If you go to a mesothelioma cancer centre, they begin treatment for pain as early as possible to provide the most relief and therefore increase the quality of the patient’s life. Early treatment for mesothelioma pain is often the most effective, regardless of the type you select.
Yoga
The second type of natural painkiller is yoga and meditation. On that scale of one to five for the production of endorphins in the body, happy thoughts and the power of positive thinking actually rated a two. It makes sense that quieting your mind and focusing away from the cancer, thus relieving the stress, can also bring pain relief.
There are many different books, which focus on the use of yoga for pain relief. While yoga may not bring pain immediately, learning it in the early stages of mesothelioma is one way to help fight later pain. In fact, many of the major cancer centers across the United States use yoga as a complementary treatment to cancer. Institutions such as MD Anderson, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Sloan-Kettering integrate it into their approach to cancer treatment.
Yoga is a non-aerobic exercise, unlike the blast exercise or running. If you adopt a physical fitness program to fight your cancer, it’s a superb addition for the days you don’t lift weights or jog in place. Even those who find it difficult to do any type of exercise can benefit from the breathing and relaxation techniques that yoga contains. The increased flexibility and relaxation are two benefits you’ll receive in addition to learning techniques to release pain.
Anxiety can heighten the pain of cancer. It’s very easy to understand that you’d have anxiety when the doctor tells you of the disease. No matter how stoic you are, it’s frightening. A 2007 issue of Journal of Clinical Oncology, tells of a study completed by Alyson Moadel, Albert Einstein College. After following the progress of patients that used yoga compared to those fighting cancer that didn’t, she found the quality of life far superior in those that did. These people fared better socially and emotionally.
One difficulty with yoga comes to those whose mesothelioma attacked the pleural lining. This may make some of the breathing techniques difficult to accomplish but not impossible, particularly in the early days of the disease.
Yoga’s origin is spiritual and the practitioners originally used it for purification of the body and spirit. Much like acupuncture, those practitioners believed yoga opened the pathways of the body to allow life energy to surge through while balancing the spirit, mind and body. The energy force, called “Chi” or “Qi” then helps the body to heal itself.
While scientific studies show that it improves breathing, lowers blood pressure, increases flexibility and concentration, aids digestion, reduces stress levels and helps the practitioner sleep, there are also studies, which indicate that it is extremely helpful in the early stages of mesothelioma to control pain.
Meditation
Pain, when faced and accepted, hurts but not to the degree that it did before mentally dealing with it. It almost sounds like science fiction but if you think about it, it makes sense. When you don’t accept your pain and simply want it to go away, you tense your entire body, making the pain worse. When you relax and accept the pain, learning to think about it in a different way, your body relaxes and while the pain is still there, it’s less intense as it had been previously.
Meditation functions much like yoga, in fact, part of yoga involves meditation. You however, can learn to meditate without learning yoga but if you learn yoga, you’ll most certainly learn meditation.
Meditation is one method of clearing your mind and focusing your concentration. Most people think that you sleep or letting your mind wander. In reality, meditation is the intense focus on one object or point in the universe, to the point all other things are oblivious. By doing this, you let go of all the other thoughts. It’s a shift of attention and becomes an altered state of consciousness.
While you might think that learning to meditate is too far out in left field to help with the pain of mesothelioma, you must consider the yogis accomplished in the skill that can alter brain waves, heartbeat and blood pressure. There’s obviously a mind-body connection. Using that connection and the power of focus, you can take the focus away from the pain and have relief without resorting to medication. This is a highly preferable method, particularly if you start early in the disease before you begin to feel pain.
Unlike alternative drug painkillers, meditation doesn’t make you groggy but actually increases your self-awareness and control. There are a number of different meditation techniques and one of them will surely suit your ability and preference. You can practice mindful meditation, which opens you to processing thoughts, what’s happening and experiencing the environment without judging it.
Breath watching meditation
Breath watching meditation tends to be the most popular. This type of meditation focuses on your breathing and a specific way of breathing. In this type of meditation, you breathe slowly through your nose to a specific count. You feel the air filling your lungs and the oxygen circulating in your body. At the end, you blow the air out through your mouth, or nose, depending on the instructor’s preference and your preference. As you do this you eliminate all other thoughts and simply focus on the breath. You continue your focus until that’s all your mind contains. While you can sit in any comfortable position, often people use yoga positions for this meditation.
Walking meditation
Walking meditation is interesting. It’s like meditating and multitasking at the same time. You walk and as you walk, you focus only on walking, breathing and the movement of your body. You get exercise and meditation at the same time. Many absent-minded professors have been known to be in deep thought as they walked and it’s similar to that, only you’re not working on a problem but simply feeling your body move.
The cross-legged position you normally associate with meditation is issued in empty mind meditation. If you’ve ever watched a cat or dog simply stare ahead, oblivious to the rest of the world, they may be doing empty mind meditation but without the yoga position. Here, you sit erect and think of nothing. It’s not as easy as it sounds. Most people find this level of meditation is easier to achieve after they’ve practiced other forms.
Transcendental meditation
Anyone over the age of 45 probably hears the words transcendental meditation and thinks of the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The Maharishi brought it to the Beatles who in turn made it popular throughout the world. In this type of meditation you use a chant, either mental or verbal to bring your mind to a state of quiet. You can use any phrase, however, many people immediately think of “OM” when the hear chant or meditation. Some teachers select your word for you. If you use this type of meditation, use a powerful word such as health to meditate.
Acupuncture
Acupuncture is another alternative technique to relieve pain. While the technique has been used for thousands of years as a medical treatment, only recently have studies been done on it’s use as a pain reliever. It has proven quite effective for that purpose.
Like yoga, the belief behind acupuncture is the realignment of the “chi” the energy force in the body. The early Chinese healers believed that if your energy force was blocked or unequal, you’d get sick. To equalize it or unblock it, they used a series of narrow needles inserted into various acupuncture points that follow the body’s energy lines.
Amazingly, medical doctors tend to refer their patients to acupuncture specialist more than they do to any other Alternative forms of medical care, according to a study completed in 1998. Of the doctors interviewed, 51 percent said they believed it had value. The newer studies focused both on reports from the patients and the activity in the brain associated with pain.
The two studies, one from the University of Heidelberg, Germany and the other from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, USA found that there is proof of pain relief from session of acupuncture. It also found that certain forms of acupuncture work better than others do.
The Heidelberg test group used the same set up as regular acupuncture. The acupuncturist attached rings with plaster to the twelve acupuncture points where the needles were to be inserted. In the placebo group, the needles were blunt tipped, meaning they only pricked the skin but didn’t penetrate. However, the rings held them in place and the group watched the procedure thinking the needles were in the skin. The placebo group reported less pain relief and had fewer positive results than the group treated with real acupuncture.
The New Jersey experiment watched the brain activity of the people to find if pain subsided with acupuncture. They used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine (fMRI) to watch where the brain showed increased blood flow. The increased flow to specific areas is an indication of pain.
In order to check their hypothesis, they wanted to find people most reactive to pain so they used a small filament to prick the inside and outside of their mouth and then watched where the increase in blood was in the brain. They found the parietal area and the brain stem showed high increase.
Once established, they then pricked the patients but at the same time, applied acupuncture to the Hegu point, the point at the V between the first finger and the thumb. Some patients received traditional acupuncture and others received a needle with a low-level electrical current called electroacupuncture.
Those receiving traditional acupuncture reported a 57 percent positive result in decreasing their pain. The brain blood flow also showed pain activity subsided in approximately 60 to 70 percent of the area. However, as remarkable as that was, the patients receiving the electroacupuncture reported 100 percent improvement and the doctors could see it on the fMRI as the patients told them. The activity decreased dramatically.
Acupuncture is one non-drug choice to reduce the pain of mesothelioma but acupressure may work just as well and be quite convenient for the patient. Acupressure uses the same acupoints as acupuncture but instead of inserting a needle, you apply pressure to the trigger points. One big advantage of acupressure over acupuncture is that often there are quick reference points the individual feeling pain can press on his own body, allowing pain relief almost instantly.
Many acupressure technologists do a complete body point balancing but can show you specific areas to use for relief and also the best method of doing the self-acupressure. In some cases, they can instruct spouses on ways to help the patient get immediate pain relief in between appointments.
Reflexology
Reflexology works much like acupressure but it only uses pressure points on the lower part of the body, the hands and the feet. It not only helps relieve pain, it also promotes total body healing by opening up the energy pathways. Some therapeutic reflexologists use essential oils for massage and aromatherapy to promote relaxation, relieve pain, improve circulation, detoxify the body and aid in the healing process.
While the treatment of pain with reflexology is highly valuable, it also helps relieve stress. These are two very high factors in the life of a mesothelioma patient. Anxiety and depression are also lifted frequently during a therapeutic reflexology massage. Reflexology also helps those experiencing nausea and other side effects of chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
Patients selecting reflexology as one form of pain relief also find that it’s something caretakers and family members can do to help them overcome the pain from mesothelioma. It’s non-invasive, requires no special equipment and there’s no worry about invading the patient’s “privacy” since it’s done on the lower leg, foot or hand. It provides an ideal way for loved ones to help bring relief and at the same time become closer.
Reiki
Another similar Asian technique comes from Japan. It is Reiki and based on the life force flowing through each of us. The word Reiki comes from two different Japanese words. The first, Rei, means God’s Wisdom and the second part, ki means life energy or life force. While the basis for Reiki is spiritual, you don’t have to follow the spiritual belief to receive results. Reiki is effective in treating many different diseases and types of pain and is a good complement to traditional medical treatment.
Massage
Traditional massage may also provide great pain relief. In addition to stimulating blood circulation and easing muscle tightness, massage therapy can also provide soothing relaxation to help the patient cope. There are as many as 80 different forms of massage therapy from which to choose. Reiki, reflexology and acupressure are all forms of massage therapy but the traditional massage therapy normally considered when mentioning massage is Swedish massage therapy.
Another form of massage therapy not previously mentioned which may be beneficial is a hot stone massage, where the masseuse uses the application of warmed stones placed on acupressure points. Deep tissue massage may be too taxing for the mesothelioma patient.
Homeopathy
Homeopathy or herbal remedies may offer some help for the cancer patient. While homeopathy is not a cure for cancer, it can provide an improved quality of life through pain reduction without side effects. It also can make the patient stronger and improve their vitality and overall health. Homeopathy treatments as well as herbal treatments can provide a counter to the side effects of radiation and chemotherapy. They also can slow the pace of the disease.
Herbal remedies and many homeopathic remedies are plant based and scientists are finding they are wonderful for pain. As mentioned in the section on diet, capsaicin, the compound found in hot peppers, not only triggers the endorphins it also brings pain relief by depleting the body of a substance that causes the sensation of pain.
Turmeric
Turmeric is not only good to repair cells that fight tumors, it also has pain-relieving qualities. Curcumin, the substance found to repair certain cells also provides anti-inflammatory relief to reduce pain. It can cause stomach upset however, so high doses or using it long term can cause stomach upset.
Ginger ale
Anyone whose mother gave them ginger ale as a way to soothe an upset stomach understands the pain relief from the substance. It too provides anti-inflammatory actions to help relieve pain and can be a good remedy for the stomach problems caused by chemotherapy.
Visualization
Finally, visualization is good for fighting cancer and relieving pain. It’s a method of creating an image in your head and focusing so intently on it, it actually occurs. Many visualization techniques revolve around the patient focusing on their own body’s cells fighting cancer cells and winning but you can change the image in your head to focus on soothing painful tissue. Like meditation, often the relaxation technique and the focus help bring about pain relief to mesothelioma patients.