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What other benefits can you get from medical counseling? Our goal in this time together is to encourage both wellness and healing.
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Medical studies show that techniques connecting body, mind, and spirit can help with:
To help you, together we can use some of these techniques, such as:
Mind-Body Medicine: Medical Counseling and Cancer Treatment When someone has a diagnosis of cancer, it is overwhelming. There is initially the shock of the diagnosis, and of being life-threatened. There are so many decisions to be made about treatment, and then there is the treatment itself. Eventually, hopefully, there is life after cancer treatment, or there may be palliative and end-of-life care. All of these phases are often accompanied by anxiety that can be intense. There may be issues of communication (with family, caregivers, and providers), depression, and the need to endure difficult treatments. There is often pain and other discomfort. After treatment, there is the need to move on with life, while assuming one’s new identity as a person who has had cancer, and there is anxiety associated with that as well. In these circumstances, it is important to help people find meaning, and become empowered to draw on their own inner resources for healing of body, mind, and spirit. In Medical Counseling, I use powerful tools such as guided imagery, meditation, and psychotherapy techniques to help people who have cancer. Guided imagery can help people discover their own wisdom and strength, set personal and treatment goals, make decisions, and manage stress and anxiety. It is effectively used (documented in many studies) to prepare for surgery and other treatments, eliminate hopelessness, help people tolerate their treatments, relieve pain and facilitate healing. Cancer treatments are often very arduous. If people tolerate the treatments, they have a better chance for survival. One study showed 31% of cancer patients (in that study) discontinued chemotherapy because of anxiety and/or depression. Studies show that guided imagery decreases anxiety and depression, thus allowing more people to tolerate treatment. (Nausea and fatigue are also reduced.) Therefore guided imagery is likely to have a positive effect on both comfort and survival. There is evidence that immune function can be augmented by guided imagery. One study showed that listening to specific recorded guided imagery reduced intestinal dysfunction after surgery by 50%. Other studies show that guided imagery can reduce intra-operative bleeding, post-op pain, use of pain medication, and hospital days. Listening to personalized recordings (we make these together), using people’s own images, allows this healing intervention to continue in people’s homes, during treatments, and in the hospital. I encourage and teach meditation, which is also very useful for reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, creating a sense of perspective, and allowing time to be spent in a deeply relaxed state. There are extensive studies in this area that show, among other benefits, that meditation reduces heart rate and blood pressure, allows quicker recovery from stressor impacts (reduces inappropriate emergency response), and is very effective in controlling and reducing pain. Mind-Body Medicine: Medical Counseling and Surgery Relaxation with guided imagery and/or self-hypnosis before and during surgery can:
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