Breast wellness relies on daily self-examinations to encourage steady lymphatic flow. We educate and encourage our patients to use essential oils to massage their breasts and reduce pain and inflammation. These regular practices will also help breasts flush out the environmental toxins that we put on and in our bodies.
Other ways to support breast wellness are avoiding restrictive clothing, wearing proper fitting undergarment support wear, and practicing daily dry skin brushing.
Preventative care
The combination of exercise and good eating supports better health. This powerful duo also lowers your risk of developing breast cancer.If you are diagnosed with cancer, exercise and a healthy diet can increase your odds of beating the disease.
All women should be familiar with how their breasts normally look and feel. Having this awareness will help you to easily notice any changes you should be concerned about.
Exams
Regular breast exams are noninvasive and should be done frequently by both you and your health provider. It’s easy to learn, simple to do, and a big part of preventative care. Breast cancer is most often found on self-examination. Lumpy breasts do not make you more prone to breast cancer but they do make it harder to detect. Seek medical advice immediately if you discover anything that feels different than usual.
Reflexology
This is a low-risk, safe holistic therapy. All the reflex points relating to glands, organs, and parts of the body are found on the hands and wrists as well as the feet. By massaging the reflex points on the bottom of the feet or hands, reflexology flushes out toxins and detoxifies the body. When pressure is applied to reflex points, blocked energy may be released and allowed to flow freely throughout the body. It can reduce pain, stress, and anxiety, enhance relaxation and sleep, and ease symptoms of cancer treatment. Reflexology improves lymphatic flow and supports the liver, kidneys, and adrenals. This is the first step toward restoring harmony and balance in the healing process.
Prosthetic
If breast reconstruction isn’t right for you, or you want to take some time to make that decision, a prosthesis, or breast form, is a wonderful and immediate option to have balanced breast shape without surgery. You can use a prosthesis (or two prostheses, if you’ve had a double mastectomy). They are custom-made to the size you need.
Undergarment Support
We all want to look good and feel supported on a day-to-day basis. We offer camisoles that lift and support without underwires, support wear to control and smooth bulges and provide compression with bounded panels that smooth the tummy and support the back and shoulders. They are made of wicking fabric that keeps you dry and cool. We also have a sports demiette that is the only wire-free sports bra option for women up to size 50.
A gentle light-touch manual therapy that addresses the central nervous system releasing tensions deep in the body to relieve pain and dysfunction. May provide relief from a variety of symptoms including headaches, neck pain, and side effects of cancer treatment among many others. CST is intended to decrease stress and tension, improve whole-body health, and increase the immune system.
Lifestyle choices have a huge effect on your overall health – you are what you eat. We will assess your dietary habits and make recommendations based on your present health and future health potential.
This is a quick and easy assessment that measures cardiovascular health. This is the only test that can measure the strength of the unconscious nervous system, such as breathing, temperature, digestion, and heart rate. Fluctuation in heart rate can indicate future health problems. The results obtained will tell us how the body reacts to an irritant, helping us to decide on the best choice of treatment.
Heavy metals toxicity from increasing levels of pollution and use of chemicals in industry is a growing threat to our health and development. High levels of toxic metals deposited in body tissues and in the brain may cause significant developmental and neurological damage.
A heavy metal hair analysis checks current exposure to toxic metals and provides important information that can lead to an early diagnosis of physiological disorders related to high levels of certain metals.
With a series of urine and saliva tests over a minimum of 24 hours we can find imbalances in hormones, cortisol response time, neurotransmitters, and melatonin to see how it affects your sleep. These tests are for women who are peri-menopausal or menopausal at any age. Testing includes follow-up consultation and recommendations to customize your treatment program with lifestyle/ diet recommendations, exercise routine, hormone supplements, bioidentical essential oils, and reduction in stress levels to rebalance your hormones.
We use an FDA-approved cold, low-level laser to treat a variety of conditions: laser for trigger points, lymphatic congestion, broad coverage of pain from tissue or bone. We can stimulate wound/scar healing, can be used for reduce inflammation ligamentus sprains, and tendonitis, arthritis, back pain, fibromyalgia, carpal tunnel syndrome pain management, lymphedema, lymph node strengthening, and a number of other treatments.
This is a tricky diagnosis that requires proper, detailed assessment. Often times after surgery there’s a reduction in number of lymph nodes due to surgical removal for diagnostic/ treatment purposes. This is what causes localized swelling and congestion of the tissues due to an overload and burden on the existing lymph nodes.
Compression Wear
We can suggest the right compression garments for the torso and the extremities, which determines the type of garment you need such as gloves, arm sleeves, socks, and compression pads for fibrotic tissue. These garments help reduce and control lymphatic swelling from conditions such as: lymphedema, lipedema, phlebitis, and fibrosis. Both daytime and nighttime garments are available and we can measure and fit our patients and determine whether they need custom or traditional-sized items.
Lymphatic Drainage
We use techniques such as manual lymphatic drainage massage, total body lymph node release, and laser treatment to the lymph nodes to reduce congestion and improve drainage.
Reflexology
This is a low-risk, safe treatment. By massaging trigger points on the bottom of the feet, reflexology flushes out toxins and detoxifies the body. It can reduce pain, stress, and anxiety, enhance relaxation and sleep, and ease symptoms of cancer treatment. Reflexology improves lymphatic flow and supports the liver, kidneys, and adrenals.
The pelvic floor supports many functions – pregnancy, delivery, sex, pleasure, urination, and bowel movements. Pelvic health is about building and maintaining a strong and healthy pelvic floor so these functions work to their capacity. This is also the foundation for long term vitality and energy.
Pain Management
Chronic pelvic pain can be a sign of inflammation or infection and generally connected to the bladder, uterus, vagina, and/or intestines. It can also signal a problem with the ligaments and muscles of the pelvic floor, and be a result of endometriosis, fibroids, adhesions, and scarring. Through exercises, manual physical therapy, trigger point release therapy, biofeedback, and other modalities that can strengthen muscles, mobilize scarring, and reduce chronic pelvic pain.
Pelvic Floor Dysfunction
Pelvic floor dysfunction is when you have difficulty coordinating your pelvic floor muscles, resulting in problems with urination, defecation, and having sex. We work on postural deviations and breathing correctly in order to facilitate the timing of postural muscles which will activate or deactivate pelvic floor muscles depending on the specific activity being performed.
Incontinence
There are three types of incontinence. Stress incontinence is triggered by laughing, sneezing, or coughing. Urge incontinence is the frequent or sudden urge to urinate that is difficult to control. Mixed incontinence is a combination of both. Treatment is determined during an internal exam. A combination of muscle-training exercises like kegels and tracking your bladder habits, along with alleviating tension in the body can determine the cause of your incontinence. Some culprits are: infections, side effects from medications, childbirth, constipation, weight gain, hormonal imbalances, menopause or perimenopause, certain surgeries, and some nerve-related disorders.
Vaginal Pain
This usually involves a combination of muscles, tissues, joints, bones, nerves, and skin. To protect themselves from pain, many sufferers subconsciously tighten their pelvic floor and vaginal muscles during sex. This can lead to vaginismus, painful muscle spasms in the vagina. Manual physical therapy, biofeedback, laser, progressive dilators, and or ultrasound may be used to stretch and tone the muscles, release scar tissue, and heal any vaginal tears.
Atrophy/ Dryness
This can be caused by many things, including menopause, breastfeeding, chemotherapy, medications, and a drop in hormone levels. The vagina walls become thin, less elastic, and less lubricated. This can be treated with certain physical therapy techniques such as dilators to stretch vulva tissue and vaginal walls. Additional modalities can be used to tone, strengthen, and improve sensation as well as elasticity and blood flow of the vaginal tissue.
Pelvic Floor Rehabilitation
Consistency with breathing and maintaining proper posture while performing exercise is the key to improving and retraining the muscles of the pelvic floor. The right pelvic floor and core exercises will help restore movement and mobility, and reduce pain. Sometimes electrical stimulation and laser is used to strengthen weak muscles. We educate our patients on how to continue these strengthening exercises at home.
We provide compassionate cancer rehabilitation and treatment. A cancer diagnosis can be devastating to the mind, body, and spirit. Though medical interventions address the disease, they may come with side effects causing pain, discomfort, fatigue, and other changes that diminish both ability and energy. Physical therapy can help.
Our treatments alleviate the issues brought on by surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. These include orthopedic complications, compromised posture, and neuropathy. Cancer patients are often heartened when they learn the power of physical therapy to heal and revitalize.
Physical therapists are the “quality-of-life” professionals – we work in partnership with patients to restore them to their previous or best functional levels. Skilled and compassionate cancer rehabilitation can improve a patient’s strength and range of motion, ease the pain, reduce nausea and fatigue, and loosen scar tightness and promote tissue healing.
Our treatment plans are tailored to each patient, and in part depend on the medication intervention and a patient’s response to it:
For Patients Planning Surgical Intervention
Before surgery, our physical therapy practice works with you to improve strength and range of motion to set you up for the best healing possible post-surgery. We help minimize post-surgical pain and reduce the risk of developing lymphedema. Furthermore, in the immediate post-op period, we help facilitate wound healing and scar management for the best cosmetic result. We educate patients about special undergarments and compression products that reduce swelling and improve comfort and appearance, and we can measure you and provide fittings for these helpful products.
For Patients Planning Chemotherapy and/or Radiation
At times, chemotherapy can affect your equilibrium. Working with a physical therapist during chemo can help reduce nausea, improve balance, and reduce fatigue. Some of our modalities – including reflexology, Reiki, and nutritional counseling – combined with a customized physical therapy plan can holistically address strength, balance, joint pain, and postural awareness.
Orthopedic Complications
Whether minor or major surgery, with or without lymph node dissection, a patient may note tightness which emanates from the surgical site. Scar tissue is the body’s way of healing from surgery or trauma. It can result in very dense tissue (just under the incision, at the drain sites and/or harvest sites) which is painful and which can restrict the range of motion (ROM) of the limb and sometimes, the lymphatic flow as well and may even affect your posture. For example, after breast cancer treatment, sometimes a “frozen shoulder” (one that is painfully restricted and which results in a markedly reduced level of function) may result from scar tissue in the surgical site or muscle spasm in the neck, chest or upper shoulder areas due to compensatory movements. PT’s can successfully restore, at a minimum, functional ROM and strength, if not return you to your previous or optimal level of shoulder function.
We work with clients who can benefit from programs with the rebounder for general cardiac conditioning/ balance and coordination skills, Exercise that reduces fat, firms the body, increases lymphatic circulation, provides aerobic effect for your heart, lowers circulating cholesterol and triglyceride levels, enhances digestion and elimination process, protects joints from chronic fatigue and pain from exercising on hard surfaces, increases white blood cell production and may prevent the need for reduction of Neulasta injections during chemotherapy treatments.
Cupping Therapy
An ancient form of Chinese medicine that helps improve superficial fascial tension, improve blood flow, relax the nervous system, disease myofascial tension, and decrease pain.
Dry Needling
Dry needling offers many clinical effects on the body. Dry needling creates very small lesions into the soft tissue to help with soft tissue dysfunction, decrease inflammation, decrease nerve sensitivity, decrease scar tissue formation, improve lymphatic circulation, local and systemic effects( nervous system) and decreased adhesions. The needle provides both physical (tissue stretch) and biological (lesions) stimuli. It is called dry needling because nothing is on the needle and the needle is so tiny that no scar tissue is created.
Instrument Assisted Soft Tissue Mobilization (IASTM)
Helps with scars and myofascial restrictions, scar tissue, and adhesions by using a metal tool that allows the PT to get deeper into the tissue.
Contact Regulatory Thermography (CRT) vs. Mammography
While both screen for breast abnormalities, thermography does so by detecting variations in temperature in breast tissue, while mammography takes an xray of the breast.
The resulting image from a thermography is like a heat map with different temperatures represented by different colors. A mammogram xray is an image of the inside of the breast that can show abnormalities such as cysts, fibroadenomas and calcifications. It looks at the anatomy and structure not the function of the breast.
Many diagnostic tests require the patient to be exposed to radiation or trauma, Contact Regulatory Thermography does not. Because we are not “imaging” an anatomical view of the body, we are able to use infrared sensors which cause no harm to the body to paint a physiological picture of the body and how it is functioning.
This whole-body thermography screening is non-invasive, safe, and convenient when compared with other types of screenings.
What Is Thermography?
Contact Regulatory Thermography is a gentle, painless, non-invasive testing method that is an adjunct diagnostic device for breast health, prostate health, thyroid abnormalities, musculoskeletal disorders, and many more chronic conditions. CRT can identify underlying causes of many chronic illnesses long before symptoms appear.
Thermography is helpful in detecting:
• Comprehensive analyses of temperature behaviors in the breast
• Neoplastic Conditions (identifies tumor-cellular environments)
• Inflammatory disorders and causal-factor identification
• Musculoskeletal disorders
• Extracranial cerebral and facial vascular disease
• Abnormalities of the thyroid gland
• Peripheral vascular disease
• Abdominal Inflammation
• Lymphatic Congestion
Contact Regulatory Thermography has been used for more than 20 years in Europe but recently has been automated to improve accuracy and interpretation.
Thermography has been used in the United States for breast cancer detection since 1956. It was cleared by the FDA in 1982 as an adjunctive procedure for breast cancer screening. There are over 800 published studies in peer-reviewed journals about Thermography of the breast alone. Most of these articles show the success rate of Breast Thermography + Ultrasound to be greater than 97% in detecting breast cancer.
This state-of-art scanning system can highlight and prioritize abnormalities of the tissue and organs key to disease contribution. This may detect things that may not necessarily be cancer. The cause could be mastitis, a benign tumor, fibrocystic breast tissue. The idea is that as cancer grows, cancer cells reproduce and require extra blood. Areas of excess blood flow in the breast tissue show up on the infra-red image as higher skin temperature or red spot in thermographic images. Breast disease can be detected by looking for areas of excessive or increasing heat that may indicate areas of angiogenesis or increase of blood vessels supplied by a growing tumor. Some neurological processes and scars show excess cold or hypothermia.
No Radiation -No Compression of Breasts
Many women, including some doctors, fear mammograms are causing over-treatment and resulting in more cases of cancer. According to a recent study published by scientists in the New England Journal of Medicine, 1.3 million women have received unnecessary and invasive cancer treatments including surgery, radiology, hormone therapy and chemotherapy over the last 30 years. This is a large part due to routine mammograms detecting harmless tumors. Other studies conducted in European countries have concluded mammograms reduce the risk of death from cancer by less than 10 percent or not at all.
Thermography can reduce the number of false positives and over-treatment of breast cancer by demonstrating whether a tumor is metabolically active or not when combined with anatomical testing like ultrasound.
Thermography is used for general breast health assessment:
As toxins and excess hormones create increased heat in the breast, monitoring of these heat patterns is an excellent way to promote wellness and see the response to various health approaches and treatments.
Young Women and Women with Dense Breasts at Increased Risk
Over 20,000 cases of breast cancer have been reported annually in women under age of 40.
Younger women and women with increased Density of breast tissue have been consistently neglected by traditional breast cancer screenings. When cancer strikes young women, it is typically a more aggressive form and is less likely to respond to treatment. There is currently no other routine screening test for women under 40, women, women with Dense Breasts or women with breast implants where cancers can often be undetected due to poor visibility of cancerous tumors. Thermography is an ideal test for this population of women considering it is a radiation-free screening and there is no compression of the breast tissue to risk spread of an existing tumor.
What To Expect During Your Thermography Session
During your Thermography session your clinician will use an FDA approved infra-red probe on 120 acupuncture points on the body to detect physiological dysfunctions and contributions to the disease process. Data from tissue temperature over these points is compared from the right side of the body to the left and in theory they should be the same. When performing a Thermogram the client is allowed 15 minutes to acclimate to room temperature and then the temperature in the room is dropped 10 degrees. Then the infra-red probe measures the same 120 acupuncture points and compares the results.
This state-of-art scanning system can highlight and prioritize abnormalities of the tissue and organs key to disease contribution. This may detect things that may not necessarily be cancer. The cause could be mastitis, a benign tumor, fibrocystic breast tissue. The idea is that as cancer grows, cancer cells reproduce and require extra blood. Areas of excess blood flow in the breast tissue show up on the infra-red image as higher skin temperature or red spot in thermographic images. Breast disease can be detected by looking for areas of excessive or increasing heat that may indicate areas of angiogenesis or increase of blood vessels supplied by a growing tumor. Some neurological processes or scars can show excess cold or hypothermia. Inflammation may be revealed in men months or even years before PSA levels start to rise.
Oncology Yoga is a method focused on the specific physical and emotional needs cancer patients deal with after treatment. All positions are modified for patients healing from surgery so they can continue to safely participate in a yoga practice.
The breath work incorporated helps to diminish side effects such as: bone loss, lymphedema, scar tissue, constipation, neuropathy, fatigue, anxiety, and many more.
Each session builds strength and flexibility, boosts both the immune system and lymphatic function, reduces fatigue and anxiety, and improves sleep.
The goal is for cancer patients and survivors to achieve the exercise guidelines in safe and effective ways. All Yoga 4 Cancer teachers have been specifically trained in these methods.
For more information, visit the Yoga 4 Cancer website (add link)
The first step to advocating for your health is getting informed. Set up your initial consultation with us today so we can educate you on how to take care of your health.
our online scheduler makes it easy to schedule a time to begin your wellness journey.
Sign up for your Complimentary 15-minute Assessment to get started.
OFFICE: 781-263-0060 | MOBILE: 617-899-7954
EMAIL: robin@circleofwellnessforwomen.com
ADDRESS: 148 Linden St. • Suite 103 • Wellesley, MA 02482
© Copyright 2024 CIRCLE OF WELLNESS FOR WOMEN All Rights Reserved