Hi Flip, I haven't been on here in awhile, but came back looking for information and noticed these posts and your comment about the severe cramping in your neck. My husband, an 11-year Stage 4A oral cancer survivor, was also having severe cramping in the neck. The right side of his neck, where lymph nodes and muscle were removed and a nerve cut, had scar tissue running down the side. The skin and tissue in the area was extremely hard and basically plastered down. This caused his head to lean towards that side, affecting his posture, and as I said, he had the severe neck cramping which happened almost every day. Due to another long-term issue that I will go into on a separate post, we decided to try out cold (low intensity) laser therapy on his jaw and neck. We started with a physical therapist through a doctor's prescription and then we were impressed enough with the results that we bought a cold laser machine of our own to use at home. This therapy really softened and loosened up his whole neck area and lower jaw area which had also become very hard. He could barely tolerate being touched on the neck before, and now he is much less sensitive. He tells me that his neck cramps have decreased by 75%, he can turn his head much further, and it is no longer affecting his posture much. This therapy is said to have many effects, one of which is to increase blood flow and improve vascularization. The downside of this is that it is a therapy that isn't widely known in the States yet, and though approved by the FDA for various things, isn't covered by insurance. U.S. chiropractors and physical therapists often have/use these machines, but we have found that MDs generally know nothing about the technology. The machines are also expensive to buy, thousands of dollars, but we have used it 5x a week for 6 months on my husband for many of his various long-term cancer-treatment issues and have had some good results. I am also a BC survivor with arm lymphedema, and the cold laser did a nice job with improving my lymphedema by quite a bit (though it didn't cure it). I also noticed that all my scar tissue from my BC surgery and radiation softened and normalized and loosened everything up quite a bit after my own cold laser treatments.


Connie
Caregiver to Jerry
SSC, BOT T2N1M0
SSC, Uvula, T1N0M0
Neck Lymph Nodes N2B
Stage 4A, age 55
Surg 2/11/2005
No chemo, 33 IMRT
HBOT, 40 dives, 10/2005
Osteoradionecrosis, Antibiotic therapy, 2012 - current
Cold Laser therapy, 7/1/15-Current