In a previous article (New Therapy) I pointed to the article in USC News about immune system regeneration through a regimen of fasting. As a side note in the referenced article in CellStemCell, it was suggested that fasting before a chemotherapy treatment would help reduce some of the worst side effects

As I am on a second round of chemotherapy treatments, and had very good luck with fasting helping the immune system issue, I was not surprised when the results were remarkable. Just before the second treatment I thought I had a cold and decided not to fast. In hind sight that was a mistake. I was miserable for more than ten days after that treatment. I will not make that mistake again!

This is not related to fasting exactly, but if you are in chemotherapy you will find this useful. For the therapy I am involved in now, there is a shot given between 24 and 72 hours after the administration of one of the drugs in the cocktail. This shot is intended to stimulate the production of white blood cells and strongly stimulates the bone marrow to produce these additional cells. This is not a gentle process. When I complained about the extreme muscle pain this caused, the Doctor suggested I take a Claritin an hour before I get the shot and said that helped some of his patients. When I asked how an anti-histamine could effect this pain, he explained that just like they reduce the swelling in your sinus by reducing the osmotic pressure within the cell walls of the nasal passages, they also reduced the pressure within the bone marrow in the same fashion. Thus when the shot overstimulates the bone marrow and causes an increase in pressure, the previous reduction by the anti-histamine keeps the result in balance rather than over stressing and causing pain. Having had a bone marrow biopsy, which is, by the way, the most painful experience I have ever had, this explanation makes a lot of sense. While the pressure from the biopsy is negative, a suction, and the shot stimulation is positive, they both involve excess pressure and obviously both have their more than fair share of pain.

However, If I can get back to my subject of fasting, while I have had great luck with applying fasting to my health problems, discussing this with my Doctor was interesting. Not that he finds anything out of line with what I am doing. More to the point, his Indian heritage provides an instant acceptance of my attempts, almost completely outside his medical training and what it might direct him to suggest. His response back to me, after mild surprise and more than a little encouragement has been to tell me how difficult it would be for him to convince many of my fellow co-patients to try what I was doing. From his perspective, Americans are just not ready to accept fasting as a useful practice. I’m sure his experience would suggest this is true. On the other hand, I live in an intentional alternative community, where many of my neighbors practice fasting on a regular basis. The suggestion that fasting would be beneficial in this instance would be totally accepted by most of my neighbors.

Fasting to clean the dead wood out of your body, and give the healthy cells room to breath, makes good sense to me, and I intend to continue to investigate the potential benefits of this behavior. If my experience is any gauge of how well this works, I can strongly suggest that anyone undergoing chemotherapy strongly consider fasting before their treatment. Even if you are weak all three days of fasting, and my experience suggests not more than half that time, it seems to me to be a good trade off against the eight to ten bad days that otherwise follow the treatment for me. What ever your choice, I wish you the best of luck.