Melanoma Treatment: Body

Managing your body well during the fight with Melanoma can become a powerful tool to add to your arsenal of weapons in your battle. Although the treatment focus tends to be on outside elements (drugs, surgery, herbs etc.), exercise, relaxation techniques and other means of working your body are critical in treating melanoma.

Melanoma and Exercise

Whenever you are facing any challenge in your life, regular exercise, whether light or strenuous, is important to keep your body in top fighting shape. Studies have shown that melanoma patient who get some form of regular exercise during treatment, experience a lower level of treatment side effects, and tend to have a more positive attitude and spirit about a positive outcome.

Melanoma and Relaxation

Learning to rest and relax your body while you are undergoing treatment and fighting melanoma can be a powerful tool. If your doctor puts you on chemotherapy, you will most likely find that your energy levels become low, and it is very important that during this time, you let your body rest and focus on fighting the melanoma.

Rest is important but relaxation is critical to support your melanoma treatment. There are a number of ways to relax your body.

• Massage: The relaxation promoted by healing touch and removal of any tension in the body can promote wellness during the melanoma treatment process.
• Acupuncture: Studies have shown that cancer patients who receive acupuncture while undergoing chemotherapy have fewer side effects and in some case, have a more positive outcome.

Melanoma and Body Chemistry

Your optimal body chemistry can play a large role in your ability to fight melanoma and cancer. Dr. Otto Warburg was awarded a Nobel prize for his work studying the environment within the body that contribute to the growth of cancer cells. He explained that cancer cells thrive in an acidic environment. Patients with advanced stages of cancer can have pH levels fall from 7.3 to as low as 5.7 in the cancer cell areas. Hence, some people believe that by raising your body's pH level, you can actually create an environment in your body in which cancer cells have a difficult time thriving.

Melanoma and Detoxification

Your body is a detoxifying machine. Every day your liver, kidneys and bladder work together to remove toxins from the food you eat and from your blood. When you go the bathroom, you are pushing out the toxins that these organs have collected. In addition, your skin works to help remove toxins by pushing them out through your sweat.

The challenge for a cancer patient is that chemotherapy and other treatments can often put so many toxins into your body that your detoxifying orgnans become overwhelmed and don't perform as well as they normally would. This can lead to nausea and other side effects that can sometimes force your doctor to stop treatment. The good news is that there are a number of things you can do to strengthen these organs, and help keep them working well, even during treatment.

• Melanoma and Acupuncture
• Melanoma and Yoga

Acupuncture can help to mitigate some of the symptoms that come with other melanoma treatments (such as chemotherapy) but may also be able to help correct some underlying imbalance that are...

Read more about Melanoma and Acupuncture.

Exercise, detoxification and relaxation are extremely important for the treatment of any disorder, but specifically for creating the ideal internal environment for beating cancers like...

Read more about Melanoma and Yoga.