Hi everyone my name is Nancy Campbell. I am the exercise physiologist in the Zakim Center for
Integrative Therapies and Healthy Living at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Today I am going
to talk to you a little bit about exercise and neuropathy, or what's often sometimes referred
to as chemotherapy induced peripheral neuropathy. So it is definitely a prevalent and unfortunately
sometimes quite debilitating side effect, sometimes from the diagnosis itself but often
in the case of CIPN, chemotherapy induced, from the chemo itself. So for most folks that I work with it
presents in the feet or the hands. Sometimes it's just the fingertips themselves that might
get a little bit numb. Sometimes they might get a little bit tingly. It could also spread from the
fingertips you know further into the hand. And then same thing with the feet. The toes might start out
a little bit numb or a little bit tingly, and then it can potentially progress more into the foot itself.
So you might be asking yourself, "What can I do about this? How can exercise help me with this?"
And the reason exercise can be helpful is it's going to help with some balance, it's going to
help with some strength, and it's going to help with some flexibility. And often all three of
those wind up being affected from the neuropathy. So we are going to target those to help deal with this side effect.
So when we think about exercise and we think about cardiovascular exercise first
you know thinking about an exercise that will be safe for you. So often one of the first things that
we might think of would be walking. And maybe in some cases if it's neuropathy in your feet maybe
that's not a great choice at this time if your feet are quite numb and it's quite uncomfortable
or finding proper footwear is uncomfortable. Maybe we don't want to be walking. Maybe we want
to be on an exercise bike, on a stationary bike, in your home or in a gym that's going to be a much safer option for you.
When we think about strength, we want to think about again which part of the body
has been affected and then what can we do to maintain the strength in that area.
So if it is in your hands we want to be working on, you know, your grip strength, the strength in your fingers,
the strength in your forearms. With your feet, we want to be making sure that we keep your calves
nice and strong, and your shins and your soleus muscles in your legs. So working on those things...
And then when we think about the flexibility side of things, so often yoga is something that we'll
think about. So we want to be mindful. If the feet are quite bothersome, there are a lot of balance
issues for you, maybe we want to start with a chair yoga class so we don't have to be concerned about
the balance initially, and potentially as you get a little bit stronger and more comfortable you
could transition to our gentle flow yoga class where you'll get a chance to work on the balance
because we definitely want to work on it but maybe the chair is where you want to start today.
So we have lots of options within the Zakim Center class-wise. So as we mentioned we have chair
classes so you could do chair yoga. We also have chair stretch and strength.
So again if balance is an issue but you still want to be working on the strength of your upper body and your legs,
the chair is often a great place to start and then as you're getting stronger, feeling more confident,
improving your balance, you can be transitioning to some of our other classes. Maybe it's the Tai Chi and Qigong.
Maybe it's a strength training class with me. So we have lots of, you know, nice array of
classes and range depending on how you're feeling that day, how your symptoms are that day.
And then beyond our classes at Dana-Farber we have other options within the Zakim Center.
Many people find acupuncture to be incredibly helpful for dealing with neuropathy so you could pursue that.
A lot of people find massage to be quite helpful, and you'll see in our series some other videos and tips and
suggestions from my team members. So I encourage you to look at our website, check out our classes.
We have live classes that go on over zoom and then we have a digital library of recorded classes.
So you can check all this out on our website which is myzakim.dana-farber.org
Thank you!