Ginger’s a pretty amazing spice quite apart from helping with chemo nausea. It’s also good with nausea all round, whether it’s morning sickness, travel sickness, or even a bad hangover, and it has lots of other health benefits as well. (See some of the links below.)

There are heaps of ways to get ginger into your system. If eating anything at all is a problem because of mouth ulcers, nausea, etc., perhaps ginger tea is your best bet. You might need to get it from a health food shop if you can’t find any at the supermarket.

If you're able to eat okay, and you or someone in your family is a great cook, you can add powdered ginger to baked goodies (think gingerbreadmen, B1), or put glacé ginger into your cake mix.

Crystallised ginger is an all-round sweet treat to nibble on during the day. I like to grab a few pieces along with some roasted cashews as a mid-morning snack.

Ginger beer is a winning drink for a hot summer day, but be sure to check the label to make sure your brand uses real ginger, and not just “ginger flavouring”.

But I think FRESH GINGER is the best possible way to take this "fab spice" (not to be confused with Victoria Beckham…). If you can handle the spiciness, just cut off a slice and chew it. Or you can throw some into your favourite Asian-style dish, and then chew on the cooked pieces of ginger to give your mouth little bursts of health-giving warmth.

For a delicious drink, mince some fresh ginger up, put it in a cup with a teaspoon of honey, add hot water, and sip away!

If you want to find out more about ginger, try this link:

http://www.indepthinfo.com/ginger/health-benefits.shtml

This link has a bunch of other ideas for dealing with nausea and other side effects of chemo and radiotherapy:

http://www.cancure.org/help_side_effects.htm

And if you’re into the scientific stuff, here’s a report about ginger’s effectiveness against chemo nausea:

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/150176.php

Does anyone have any other ideas about how to get the best out of ginger?