Changes in food taste: How to eat during chemo

A relatively common side effect of chemotherapy is changes in food taste: The sweet, salty, sour, and bitter flavors you are used to just don’t taste the same. The name for this is Dysgeusia. What, if anything, can be done to help with this?
Read more

Getting your body and mind ready for surgery

I read an interesting paper published this year entitled “Can we measure surgical resilience?” It is just a hypothesis at this stage, but the authors are looking at whether there are biomarkers in patients that can measure psychological resilience associated with improved surgery recovery and healing.

They define resilience as “the ability to accept circumstances that cannot be changed, and to adapt to significant changes in the environment.”  Based on this definition, they are investigating different biomarkers that can distinguish high resilience from low resilience, with the idea that these biomarkers could then be prognostic of surgical recovery.  Once identified, the goal then would be how to utilize these biomarkers to find ways to optimize the resilience of low resilient people before they go into surgery, thus leading to better recovery. [...READ MORE]

CALMERme - Cancer Advocacy through Lifestyle Medicine, Empowerment and Research

I've launched a new website called CALMERme - an acronym for 'personalized cancer advocacy through lifestyle medicine, empowerment and research.'

It just got started but we have great plans for the future. I hope you'll take a look.

The goal is to support cancer patients through their diagnosis, treatment, and recovery by empowering them to incorporate lifestyle medicine approaches to help reduce treatment side effects, make the body inhospitable to cancer (for prevention and to prevent recurrence), and make the body AND mind and spirit healthy again.

I'll be putting some of the blog posts here too.

Would love to hear your comments.