Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Helping Clear Up Chemo Brain

Chemotherapy is a toxic process used to treat patients with brain tumors or other cancerous cells within the brain. For people who are lucky enough to survive a brain tumor with an effective chemotherapy process, the side effects of this therapy can be beyond debilitation themselves. Once such side effect that lingers after therapy is called chemo brain.

Chemo brain is best described as a mental fogginess or cloud that interrupts the patient’s ability to be able to think clearly, recall memory and even go about their normal daily routines.

There are considerable objections in the professional medical community as to exactly what chemo brain is. For people that suffer this condition, they report problems with their memory, inability to focus and/or concentrate on anything for any amount of time, and they even have problems holding a conversation because they can’t find the right words to complete sentences.

Normal things that you and I take for granted, people that have undergone chemotherapy and experience chemo brain just couldn’t grasp. There are a few things that people suffering from this condition can do such s brain training in order to regain some of their mental sharpness and ability to recall things back.

The whole point of chemotherapy is to use toxic radiation levels to try and destroy the cancerous cells. During this process, the radiation also destroys healthy cells as well including neurons that are required to send signals to other parts of the body.
Getting these synapses and neurons to fire and take place again, you will have to go through a rigorous mental training and re-training process. Participating in mental games that test your mental capacity has been shown to help aid in the production of more neurons making more electronic signals.

This is a slow process and one that might be frustrating at first, but if you take up an attitude to train your brain consistently each and every day, it is possible to get some of that memory and focus ability back.

While you are going through this rigorous process training your brain to get its neurons to fire like they used to, you may also want to make sure that you use memory aides to assist you as well. Day planners and a daily normal routine will really help in this process of fighting chemo brain. As always, make sure to consult a professional medical doctor before you make any final decisions about curing your own health ailments.

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