Colorectal Cancer Support: What to Watch For, When to Screen, and How We Help Alongside Your Oncology Team
By Dr. Chris Cormier, DC — Founder, The Nerve Health Institute Colorectal cancer can develop quietly for years before it announces itself. A polyp forms, changes slowly, and produces no symptoms at all while it does so. That is the cruel part, and it is also the hopeful part. A disease that takes years to develop is a disease with a long window in which it can be found — and found early, colorectal cancer is one of the most treatable cancers there is. So I am going to do something slightly unusual for a clinic page. Before I tell you anything about what we offer, I am going to tell you about screening, because that is the single most valuable thing on this page. Then I will explain what colorectal cancer support looks like here — which is cellular and functional care alongside your oncology team, and nothing more than that. Screening Is the Part That Actually Saves Lives Guidelines now recommend that adults at average risk begin colorectal cancer screening at age 45, not 50. That change was made because the disease is appearing more often in younger adults — people in their forties, thirties and even twenties — and the previous starting age was missing them. You can read the current guidance directly from the CDC and the US Preventive Services Task Force. I link to them rather than paraphrasing because this is the one subject on this page where I want you reading a primary source. Several options exist, including at-home stool-based tests as well as colonoscopy. The best screening test is the one you will actually do. If the idea of a colonoscopy is what has been stopping you, ask your doctor about the alternatives rather than continuing to put it off. And if you have a family history of colorectal cancer or polyps, inflammatory bowel disease, or a known genetic syndrome such as Lynch syndrome, you may need to start earlier. That is a conversation to have now rather than at 45. The Symptoms Never to Dismiss Because of Your Age This is where early-onset cases are being missed. Symptoms in younger adults get attributed to haemorrhoids, to diet, to stress, to training — and the evaluation does not happen. Get assessed promptly if you have: Most of these turn out to be something less serious. That is exactly why they get dismissed, and it is why so many younger patients are diagnosed late. If symptoms are present, what you need is not a screening test — it is a diagnostic evaluation, and a colonoscopy is usually the right one. If you are under 45 and have been told you are too young to worry, ask again. Persist. What Colorectal Cancer Support Means at Our Clinic Now the part about us, and I want the boundary stated before the services rather than after them. We are not a cancer clinic. Nothing we do cures, prevents or treats cancer. I say that in every interview I give and I will say it here. Our work is cellular and functional support for people living through treatment and recovering afterwards — and that is a real need that nobody else in the care pathway is assigned to. What people come to us for, in practice, is the damage treatment leaves behind. Chemotherapy regimens used in colorectal cancer are among those most associated with peripheral nerve damage — numbness and tingling in the hands and feet, loss of fine motor control, unsteadiness. That is covered in detail in our article on chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, and it is the most common reason people find us after treatment. Alongside that: fatigue that outlasts the treatment, months of lost conditioning, disrupted sleep, and a system that has spent a long stretch in a protective state. Our wider approach to this is set out in holistic cancer support. The OWL Method: What Every Cell Runs On Everything we do is built on a framework I developed over nearly three decades. I call it the OWL Method — Oxygen, Water and Light — because these are not wellness concepts. They are what your cells are physically made of and run on. Oxygen — the number one ingredient Oxygen is what cellular energy production runs on, and it is the first thing to run short. A cell low on oxygen cannot clear waste efficiently, produce energy well, or repair at the rate it should. After months of treatment, most people’s capacity to move air and circulate it has dropped considerably. This is the foundation everything else sits on. Water — the medium everything happens in You are around 60% water, and every transaction in your body — nutrient delivery, waste removal, signal transmission — happens in that medium. We work on both the quantity and the quality, because both change what the cell actually receives. Light — the energy your nervous system runs on Your brain and nervous system operate on light energy, travelling like fibre optics through a network reaching every cell. We also evolved under a sun that is roughly half near-infrared, and we now spend the overwhelming majority of our lives indoors. Restoring that is not a metaphor; it is something we do with specific equipment. Alongside these sit frequency, magnetism and nutrients — the supporting ingredients that make the first three usable. Most people start at nutrients and skip the entire hierarchy above. The Technologies We Use, and What Each One Is For Quantum Neurology and the 88-nerve assessment Quantum Neurology is where our work differs most. Your brain is a power company wired to trillions of cells through 88 major nerves branching off the brain and spinal cord. We test function across all of them and map exactly where power is not arriving — what we call EnergyFlow. For someone with treatment-related nerve damage, this is the assessment nobody else in your care team performs. Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy HBOT is a pressurised chamber driving oxygen into tissue at