Nause and vomiting are common symptoms of cancer patients. Patients often experience symptoms such as nausea and vomiting during radiotherapy and chemotherapy, causing extreme physical and mental discomfort.
Cancer patients experience varying degrees of This is mainly because chemotherapy drugs stimulate our gastrointestinal tract, which causes a cell in the body called chromaffin to release neurotransmitters. When it binds to receptors, it sends signals from the vagus or sympathetic nerves. It is transmitted to the central nervous system that triggers vomiting, thus triggering the occurrence of vomiting. Another is that the patient has psychological fear after being tortured by vomiting. This kind of mental tension will stimulate the cerebral cortex, so when the patient hears or thinks about radiotherapy and chemotherapy, he will subconsciously want to vomit.
However, the vomiting of cancer patients is not often caused by radiotherapy and chemotherapy. For example, if cancer patients suffer from primary brain tumors, or other Tumors, such as breast cancer and other tumor diseases with brain metastases, will increase the intracranial pressure of the brain, cause a kind of projectile vomiting, and also cause headaches and papilledema.
If the patient’s tumor is a digestive tract tumor, the tumor can block part of the digestive tract or even the entire digestive tract when it grows by itself, which is It will make it difficult for food and other contents to pass through, thus causing vomiting. This type of vomiting often has clinical symptoms of intestinal obstruction, such as abdominal pain, vomiting, and abdominal distension.
Frequent vomiting will not only seriously affect the patient’s quality of life, but also lead to dehydration, electrolyte imbalance, malnutrition, and even damage to the digestive tract mucosa Dangerous situations such as injury, bleeding, and infection occur, which can easily endanger the life safety of patients. Therefore, we must pay attention to the problem of cancerous vomiting in time.
Today we will focus on post-chemotherapy of vomiting. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that vomiting after radiotherapy and chemotherapy is mostly caused by the deficiency of both spleen and stomach qi and yin caused by prolonged illness, so that the stomach loses harmony and descends, and the qi goes against the top. It is mainly manifested as nausea, vomiting, hiccups, belching, loss of appetite and other symptoms. It belongs to the disease of positive deficiency and evil excess, and the mixture of deficiency and excess. In treatment, both attack and supplement should be used, and the deficiency and evil should be mainly tonic.
Take a medical case as an example. A male patient with gastric cancer experienced severe nausea and vomiting after two courses of chemotherapy, and then continued to retch , Difficulty in eating, fatigue and fatigue, only infusion to maintain vital signs. This patient suffered from gastric cancer with a long history, which caused damage to the spleen and loss of luck, resulting in deficiency of spleen-qi, inability to gather and transport, stomach-deficiency and Qi-reversal, and the syndrome of spleen-stomach-qi deficiency. Because the patient underwent a subtotal gastrectomy, the stomach qi was severely injured, and multiple courses of chemotherapy were carried out later, and the chemotherapy drugs were mostly of the heat type. Losing and descending will form a syndrome of deficiency of both stomach qi and yin, which will cause a series of symptoms such as nausea and vomiting. Treatment should be based on nourishing qi and nourishing yin, lowering adverse flow and relieving vomiting, promoting blood circulation and dissipating blood stasis. Stir-fried Atractylodes macrocephala, Poria cocos, Achyranthes bidentata, agarwood, clove, tangerine peel, American ginseng and other medicines are used. After the second visit: the patient’s nausea and vomiting symptoms were relieved, and his physical strength increased. After the third visit: the nausea and vomiting disappeared, eating returned to normal, and the spirit improved greatly.
When cancer patients have vomiting symptoms, they also There will be difficulty in eating, which will lead to weight loss, which will cause cancer patients to suffer from malnutrition and low immunity, making it impossible for patients to support subsequent treatment, and even increase the chance of infection or complications of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. If we can intervene in the treatment of traditional Chinese medicine in advance before chemotherapy and radiotherapy, it will be able to reduce the gastrointestinal reactions after chemotherapy and radiotherapy to a certain extent, and it can also enhance the tolerance of patients to chemotherapy and radiotherapy, so that the treatment of radiotherapy and chemotherapy can be carried out smoothly, thereby improving The treatment effect allows patients to achieve a more ideal prognosis.