Hospice/Palliative care and Magnesium

In general, as we age our tendency to compounded accumulative
magnesium deficiencies only increases leaving us increasingly vulnerable to a wide range of disorders and in the final analysis, to a miserable death.

When we employ highly concentrated nutritional elements like magnesium chloride with late stage cancer patients we see things that mainstream oncologists don’t. This chapter is about magnesium massage, about how to employ one of these super nutritional medicines in the most comforting way possible.

Magnesium massage is the type of treatment that Cleopatra would have enjoyed; a medical treatment for kings and queens that can be employed by anyone in their own homes if one has a loved one with caring and willing hands or if one has access to a professional massage therapist.

Many people needlessly suffer pain
because they don’t get enough magnesium.
Dr. Mildred Seelig

When a patient is facing a serious illness, they need relief; relief from pain, fatigue, nausea, loss of appetite and shortness of breath as well as relief from stress.

Doctors often think that Palliative and Hospice Care need to focus on improving patients’ ability to tolerate aggressive medical treatments. But patients themselves feel the need for support to be able to carry on with everyday life; they need to get their life back on some level that makes them feel that life is worth living. In short, they want to feel better.

Nothing will make a person feel better than magnesium massage and that is why it is recommend universally even to patients at deaths door.

Study after study demonstrates that for all mammals,
receiving touch that is pleasurable, safe and appropriate
reduces sickness, depression and aggressive behaviors.
Dr. Ben Benjamin

There are many ways to calm a person, many healing and medical treatments that can reduce stress, reduce sensory overload, slow the heart and help a person center and nothing does this better than touch.

The most beautiful forms of touch are healing techniques and this is what professional massage therapists’ true aim is, to heal through touch. Many studies have demonstrated that receiving touch that is pleasurable, safe and appropriate reduces sickness, depression and aggressive behaviors. Thus massage has its application in both therapy and medicine.

Skin hunger is a relatively new term that has been applied to the emotional response engendered by the loss of touch in our society. The hunger for touch is a real human need.[1] And though touch is physical, the need provides sustenance and anchoring for our emotional, mental and spiritual selves.

Clinically the lack of touch leads to a host of emotional, physical and developmental problems in young and old alike. Research has shown that there are distinct biochemical differences between people who experience touch and those who are severely deprived of it.

Today, not only patients but also the medical establishment recognizes the importance of alternative therapies, and particularly the importance of massage therapy in comprehensive cancer care.

Massage, like most alternative cancer therapies, is most effective when used in conjunction with other treatments. Magnesium massage combines the transdermal application of magnesium chloride with any one of a variety of massage techniques creating a potent medical treatment in its own right.

Massage is unique in cancer therapy and has great application in Hospice Care because it is able to remedy feelings of isolation that many patients battling a difficult disease encounter. The experience of human contact is particularly important when facing a difficult diagnosis and massage can provide that unique experience to cancer patients, who often succumb to feelings of being overwhelmed by the nature of their diagnosis, family implications, and other difficulties associated with cancer treatments.

Patients undergoing chemotherapy often find that treatments that help them relax their mind and body will lessen side effects like nausea, restlessness, and fever.

Massage therapists have the great pleasure of seeing the profound relief that massage can provide to people undergoing intense treatments like chemo and radiation therapy. Helping people feel better satisfies on a deep level of human experience and there is simply not enough of this in the field of medicine.

With our heart and hands working together we can reach directly into another person’s being through the surface of their skin. We can touch someone very deeply and when we do, we are touched equally. The laws of giving and receiving work perfectly in the world of touch! Now we are adding to the mix one of the most potent medicinals available in the world of medicine and applying it all over the body for transdermal absorption.

Magnesium is absolutely essential for healthy living and when applied liberally onto the skin we find patients responding most wonderfully.

Magnesium applied directly to the skin alleviates chronic pain, muscle cramps, and in general makes our job of opening up and softening muscles and connective tissue much easier. Magnesium is a potent vasodilator, and smooth muscle relaxant. Dr. Linda Rapson, who specializes in treating chronic pain, believes that about 70 per cent of her patients who complain of muscle pain, cramps and fatigue are showing signs of magnesium deficiency.

“Virtually all of my patients improve when I put them on magnesium,” says Rapson.

The skin provides the best avenue into the body for many medicinals and drugs. When it comes to magnesium we have a method in our hands that is similar in effect to intravenous magnesium treatments that are used to save peoples’ lives in emergency rooms. We simply use the magnesium oil like we would massage oils, or create a special blend mixing essential oil or other massage oils together with the magnesium chloride, which is quite slippery even though there is no oil in the ‘magnesium oil.’

Transdermal magnesium chloride therapy is inexpensive, safe, a do-it-yourself at home technique that can easily replace uncomfortable injections in anything other than emergency room situations.

What a few can do with intravenous magnesium
injections everyone can do with transdermal magnesium.

Transdermal mineral therapy with magnesium chloride is the most powerful, safe medical intervention we have to care for many of our patients needs. With the simple application of this slightly oily solution on the skin or used in baths we can easily have our clients take up their magnesium to healthier levels. Magnesium Oil is the perfect companion to a massage in any setting, fulfilling further the purposes of giving healing touch to patients.

Transdermal magnesium chloride is highly effective in pain relief, calming agitation, and is easier to use when oral intake of food may become impaired in old age or disease. It is much easier to apply magnesium oil on the skin of an elderly person than it is to submit them to force feeding of food, pills or IV administration of drugs to compensate for losses.

Extracted from www.magnesiumforlife.com