Boosting Your Immune System - share your ideas

[agness]

Juls asked for a separate thread about boosting immunity so here goes. If you have anything to offer -- things that helped or didn't throughout treatments, then please do share.


I think I eluded to this elsewhere but I abstained from taking neulasta during chemo. I read about how it works to push the pedal on the bones to produce white blood cells which can have a protective affect during treatment but I was so depleted this seemed like a bad strategy. You don't push the depleted body to the edge like that. The other things that bothered me were that so many patients were complaining of bone pain from the Neulasta, not only that but that they were being told to take Claritin to deal with the bone pain.

Chemo --> Neulasta --> Claritin

Did this cascade of interventions ever end?

Then I read about a late stage woman with ovarian cancer, they gave her Neulasta again and her body didn't respond, she has used up all of her reserves. I wanted to save this medication for when I needed it.

I asked my Chinese Medicine doc if he could help and he said yes. Early studies indicated that Chinese Medicine could effectively boost the immune system during treatment, it was out there but it matched everyting I knew about this medical approach to the body. I told my MO I was going to hold off and see what Chinese Medicine could do for me. He put me on a tea pill formula he labelled "Energy" and the next round of blood labs the nurse said, "that's weird." Immediately I went into a panic, who wants their chemo nurse saying that their blood labs are weird? She continued, "your levels went up when they usually go down". It was the TCM, and it was working.

If that wasn't proof enough, after chemo ended my TCM doc got me off "Energy" and onto a kidney formula, to help recover from chemo pain (I could barely walk the stairs). My MO started getting worried when two blood draws showed lowered WBC counts; he suggested it might be because of the Chinese herbs. That didn't make sense to me as my body had been fine with the treatments all the way through so why would it start affecting me now, plus TCM is about boosting the body, not depleting it. I keep all my blood labs in a spreadsheet and I entered my labs and kept thinking about this. Suddenly I noticed the spike up and the spike down -- my body had responded, going up when it should have gone down and down when they thought it should go up -- the Chinese herbs were to "blame" because they were working. I called over to my TCM office to ask and they agreed that it was probably that I needed to be on the "Energy" formula, and also because the body and blood were strained as we started to shift seasons into Late Summer -- the time of the spleen and blood (I know about Chinese 5 Element Theory also).

I've stayed on that formula since and there haven't been any issues.