Cancer Patients Feel Better with Exercise, Psychotherapy

Chemotherapy and radiation can cause many cancer patients to become stressed and fatigued. Researchers have recently announced that psychological counseling and getting regular exercise will help cancer patients reduce their stress and increase their energy level.

The treatment regime for most types of cancer can be long, difficult, and cumbersome. The battle for one's life is stressful by itself. Compounded with chemotherapy and radiation therapies, many cancer patients often suffer from extreme fatigue.

What can be done to help cancer patients deal with the additional stress and fatigue caused by cancer treatments? Many cancer patients believe they're already taking enough medication, and prefer to see a more natural way of regaining strength, both emotionally and physically.

Researchers have determined that getting regular exercise and psychological counseling can help cancer patients with both physical fatigue and emotional fatigue and stress. Nearly half of the patients who participated in the research trials reported having an improvement in their energy level and their state of mind.

While the results didn't prove to be earth shattering, there were positive results. To many cancer patients, these results provided another glimmer of hope to improve their life while undergoing treatment. Similar results were obtained whether patients utilized psychotherapy or exercise.

"The overall effects of both psychological and activity-based interventions on fatigue were modest. The effects of psychological interventions were sufficiently large, however, to say that they were unlikely to have occurred by chance alone using conventional definitions of statistical significance," said Paul Jacobsen, of the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida.

When patients suffer from fatigue, even the smallest activities of daily living can become chores that are too large accomplish. Indeed, researchers determined that a third of cancer patients say that their treatment interferes with their lives, relationships, ability to work, emotional and physical well-being.