When you're fighting cancer, you want any weapon available.
At Lima Memorial Health System, a whole new battery of weapons has
been combined to aid in this important fight.
"Integrative Cancer Care For Health And Healing
has been created to provide additional resources to our cancer
patients," said Nora Fought, Oncology Coordinator with LMHS at the
Wellness Center.
"We felt it was important to look at the whole
person in fighting cancer," Fought said. "That led us to working on
lining up additional treatment options for our cancer
patients."
"We're very excited to be the first in the
region to offer this type of complete and innovative care for
cancer patients," Fought said.
The Integrative Cancer Care For Health And
Healing concept takes many types of treatment and support and rolls
them into a program to benefit LMHS patients.
Integrative Medicine by definition is both
doctors and patients bonding with the philosophy of its
whole-person approach -- designed to treat the person, not just the
disease.
Fought said, "We believe the patient is the most important member
of the medical team and our focus is on what is best for the
patient. Period."
"IM, as it's often called, depends on a partnership between the
patient and the doctor, where the goal is to treat the mind, body,
and spirit, all at the same time," said Darlene Weyer, D.O., and
director of the LMHS Cancer Institute at the Medical Park.
She added, "While some of the therapies used may be
nonconventional, a guiding principle within integrative medicine is
to use therapies that have high-quality evidence to support
them."
"We understand that we will need to explain to our patients what
we mean by Integrative Medicine," Fought said. "We are combining
the traditional approaches to cancer treatment of surgery,
chemotherapy and radiation with things like physical therapy to
improve range of motion or strengthen a person's muscles and
acupuncture and massage therapy. We also offer a wide variety of
pain relief therapies."
Fought explained that physicians will have a new referral form at
their disposal and through conversations with patients, these
integrative therapies can be used to treat a variety of issues -
from pain associated with the disease or its treatment to the
spiritual and emotional support that is so important in the fight
against cancer.
Among the therapies being offered are massage therapy, yoga and
Reiki therapy, nutritional counseling, support groups,
psychological services, social services, pain management,
chiropractic care, acupuncture, physical therapy, speech therapy
and image enhancement.
See the Integrative Cancer Care For Health And
Healing
video on WLIO.