DAAN Chinese Herbs and Acupuncture

Does your pet have stagnant Qi? Then acupuncture is the answer
“Henry and Randy are big old cats that are trapped, like all of us, in a futile battle against time. Henry has a sore mouth and a slowly failing immune system. Randy has a nasty case of arthritis.

For Pam Miller of Manteca, who owns the two cats, a trip to the vet used to be a nightmarish experience, marked by frenzied escape attempts and nervous urinations. It was common for Miller to drive to the vet’s office as the two cats knelt in their carrying cages and — seemingly knowing where they were headed — howled in despair.”

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Women are turning to traditional Chinese medicine to help with the symptoms of breast cancer:

“Surgery, toxic chemicals and potent radiation can beat breast cancer, but they can wear a woman down. That’s why patients at some of the nation’s top medical centers are turning to experts in the ancient art of Chinese medicine…

Betsy Smith is getting acupuncture not for the side affects of chemotherapy but for relief from back pain, which could be one of the many problems breast cancer patients face.

Amy Sear is the president of the Florida Society of Oriental Medicine and Acupuncture. She practices at a breast cancer center in south Florida, but recently visited Orlando. Her hair-thin needles are where the east meets west in modern medicine.

“One of the side affects of acupuncture is that you feel wonderful,” Amy said.

She begins with a long examination. Her ancient counterparts had no fancy instruments. They relied on a patient’s tongue and pulse.

“They considered it the only way to look into the body,” said Amy.

She’ll insert the needles at specific points along Betsy’s body to treat her specific problems.

“I’m going to add in some basic relaxing points that have to do with the mind. They call it quieting the mind,” Amy tells Betsy as she inserts the needles.

In addition to relieving stress, helping with sleep, and giving the patient a sense of well being, researchers at Duke University discovered acupuncture can reduce nausea with fewer adverse side affects than a leading medication.

Doctors say patients seemed to have less pain and were more satisfied with their recovery. .. Important factors in determining how quickly they can return home after surgery.

“One of the things I respect about this treatment is the time she gave to me to listen to my concerns,” said Betsy.

“I’m there to soften their situation, anxiety, calmness and to take the edge off their symptoms,” Amy said.

Many breast cancer patients have to take the drug tomoxifen to help prevent their cancer from coming back. But that can throw a women into instant menopause with hot flashes can be so annoying some women stop taking the drug. Because acupuncture can relieve those symptoms, it may help women stay on the drug longer and that can save lives.

Remember acupuncture is done along with regular oncology treatments. Not instead of them.”

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Interesting background on the practice of Chinese medicine:

“Though some TCM hospitals are equipped with modern examination machines, experienced TCM doctors still rely on four basic diagnostic tests in their treatment of common illnesses, writes Zhang Qian.

Without X-ray photography or stethoscope, traditional Chinese medicine developed four diagnostics through long practice, namely, inspection, auscultation and olfaction, inquiring, and palpation and pulse-feeling.

TCM believes in a close relation between the outside of the human body and the organs inside. The changes of vital energy, blood, yin and yang of the organs usually reflect on the body surface.

Inspection is observing the changes on the relevant regions of the sufferers’ body and the changes of excretion of them to understand the state of pathological changes.

Vitality and mental state, skin color, physical condition and the tongue are the most frequently inspected regions that tell one’s health condition. For example, the color of a healthy person’s tongue is light red, indicating his or her vital energy is strong and the organs and blood circulation are healthy. Changes in the tongue color usually reflect chronic illness.

Auscultation and olfaction usually include two aspects - auscultation of voice and olfaction of odor which includes hearing the changes in sounds of speech and breath of sufferers and smelling the changes of odor of the mouth and the odor of excretions.

Inquiring is asking the sufferer and his or her companion questions about the symptoms the sufferer feels, present medical history, past medical history and other related matters. Perspiration, defecation, urination, taste for food, and condition of sleep are all frequently asked by a TCM doctor in diagnosis.”

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Studies show that acupuncture is effective for back pain:

“Fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing for low back pain, and either kind performs much better than usual care, German researchers have found. Almost half the patients treated with acupuncture needles felt relief that lasted months. In contrast, only about a quarter of the patients receiving medications and other Western medical treatments felt better.

Even fake acupuncture worked better than conventional care, leading researchers to wonder whether pain relief came from the body’s reactions to any thin needle pricks or, possibly, the placebo effect.

“Acupuncture represents a highly promising and effective treatment option for chronic back pain,” study co-author Dr. Heinz Endres of Ruhr University Bochum in Bochum, Germany, said in an e-mail. “Patients experienced not only reduced pain intensity, but also reported improvements in the disability that often results from back pain and therefore in their quality of life.”

Although the study was not designed to determine how acupuncture works, Endres said, its findings are in line with a theory that pain messages to the brain can be blocked by competing stimuli.

Positive expectations the patients held about acupuncture — or negative expectations about conventional medicine — also could have led to a placebo effect and explain the findings, he said.

In the largest experiment on acupuncture for back pain to date, more than 1,100 patients were randomly assigned to receive either acupuncture, sham acupuncture or conventional therapy. For the sham acupuncture, needles were inserted, but not as deeply as for the real thing. The sham acupuncture also did not insert needles in traditional acupuncture points on the body and the needles were not manually moved and rotated.”

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Malaysia will host a conference on women’s health and traditional medicine later this year.

“IF the names Orthosiphon aristatus and Labisa pumila sound like Greek to you, do not worry. You can learn more about them in the third Women’s Health and Asian Traditional Medicine (WHAT Medicine) Conference & Exhibition, which will be held in the Putra World Trade Center (PWTC), Kuala Lumpur on November 16-18.

Orthosiphon aristatus and Labisa pumila are the scientific names for Misai Kucing and Kacip Fatimah, traditional plants used widely as medicinal herbs in Malaysia.”

Tags: General, East and West by DAAN
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As traditional Chinese medicine continues to gain popularity, there are efforts to modernize its image and further study its benefits trough scientific research:

“Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine are upgrading the 4,000-year-old healing method to improve its image. They are trying to make it more palatable to a new generation who are accustomed to visiting spas and “wellness” clinics. Most young Chinese use western-style GPs as their first port of call when they are sick but still believe that swallowing tortoise shell, deer pizzle, centipede, scorpion or sea horse, or sticking needles into their skins can treat a wide range of illnesses, as can the vast array of herbal remedies. However, traditional Chinese medicine has an image problem – the potions taste awful and smell even worse.

Boutique owner Huang Zhaohe, for example, said she had great success using traditional Chinese medicine to help her lose weight, but admitted it was a struggle. “Once, when I saw what went into the medicine, I felt sick but now I am used to it,” she said. “There are some strange things in Chinese medicine.”

Zhang Xiaoting, a student from Shanghai, began using traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) when she was a teenager, to regulate her menstrual cycle and clear up her acne. She was pleased with the effects but found the concoction hard to swallow. “My mum boiled it at home in the evening,” she said. “The bitter taste made it very difficult to drink but the acne went away and my skin cleared up.”

TCM is still popular in China because evidence suggests the old remedies are effective. Many poor people in rural areas rely on it because they have no access to western-style healthcare. Yet even the wealthy, modern Chinese like to complement western treatments with a holistic approach.

The rising incomes of young urban professionals have seen spas pop up all over Beijing, many of them offering therapies inspired by TCM. These are said to have fewer side effects than western drugs.

Stroke patients are often given acupuncture as part of their treatment. Indeed, the practice of inserting needles under the skin has even become more common in GPs’ surgeries. About 3,000 Chinese hospitals provide TCM and see 234 million patients each year. The industry, worth £64bn annually at the last count, is growing by 20 per cent a year.

The Modernised Chinese Medicine International Association, based in Hong Kong, advocates using TCM in granulated form. A patient simply whisks the granules into boiling water, rather than letting an array of foul-smelling herbs and questionable ingredients sit stewing on their cooker for hours. Scientists are using new technologies to standardise doses and are carrying out more rigorous clinical testing to assess why the remedies work.

TCM is derived from a number of philosophies including the Taoist theory of “yin and yang”, which asserts that the processes of the human body are interrelated and in constant interaction with the environment. Signs of disharmony help a TCM practitioner to understand, treat and prevent illness and disease.

Tortoise shell, for example, is said to cure a “yin” deficiency by reinforcing body fluids and nourishing the blood, while earthworm and centipede help to reduce swellings. Scorpion is used to deal with migraine and rheumatism. However, the use of ingredients from endangered species has harmed TCM’s image . Another popular cure calls for a dose of bear bile drained from a painful tap in a bear’s spleen. Some TCM practitioners are now advocating the use of alternatives, such as artificial substitutes for things like tiger paw.

A visit to a traditional Chinese pharmacy is still quite an experience. Walls are lined with hundreds of wooden boxes holding the herbs and medicines, boiled or dried. White-coated pharmacists weigh ingredients on scales, combine them into pungent preparations and scoop them into paper cones. While buying a sachet of artificial tiger paw might be a less romantic option, it is certainly a more sustainable one.”

Tags: General, East and West by DAAN
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Acupuncture can be an effective treatment for hay fever:

“Chinese acupuncture helps clear up runny noses and other hayfever symptoms, a scientific study suggests.

Melbourne researchers tested the ancient needle therapy on people with persistent nasal allergies and found it could offer some relief from a runny nose, congestion, sneezing and sinus pressure.

The study, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, is the first in English literature to analyse the benefits of acupuncture in adults with severe hayfever.

The common condition is routinely treated with medication but the researchers conclude that needlework “may provide a safe and effective” drug-free alternative.

Lead investigator Professor Charlie Xue, from the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Traditional Medicine at Melbourne’s RMIT University, enlisted 80 patients aged from 16 to 70 for twice-weekly treatment sessions.

Half received genuine acupuncture, where needles were inserted up to three centimetres deep into “acupoints”, while the others had a sham therapy, which involved shallow and wrongly-placed insertions.

After eight weeks, patients treated with real therapy found a greater relief from symptoms than those on the fake version.

And three months after therapy had ended this group still had fewer symptoms than their fellow sufferers.

“The reduction in the (symptoms) with treatment, and the persistence of the effect, appear to be the most clinically significant findings of the study,” Prof Xue wrote.”

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Efforts to modernize the practice of traditional Chinese Medicine is evident at a conference in Hong Kong:

“Hong Kong is on the cutting edge of the movement to modernize traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), a practice which dates back thousands of years, and ranges from herbal medicine to acupuncture, massage and Qigong. Underlying the philosophy is the idea that good health is inexorably related to balance and harmony — to Yin and Yang, the human meridian system, the five elements, and the Zang Fu organ theory system.

Raised in the heart of Silicon Valley amid a burgeoning Chinese population, I already had some experience with TCM: My family had tried it when my brother developed an assortment of health problems, baffling Western doctors. I once accompanied him to a little herb shop in downtown San Jose run by a traditional Chinese doctor; walls lined with glass jars full of herbs, barks, dried berries and leaves of every shape and color. The practitioner did a “pulse diagnosis” on my brother and prescribed a half-dozen ingredients that simmered on the stove for hours into a foul-smelling, bitter-tasting brew. My brother drank it dutifully — with ambiguous results.

The TCM showcased at this year’s conference bore little likeness to the dusty herb shop of my childhood memories — still ubiquitous throughout the mainland. Gone are the jars of roots, dried berries and musty-smelling tree bark. In their place are neatly packaged pills — ginkgo, herbal remedies, ginseng — aimed at a burgeoning western market.

Interest in complementary and alternative medicine is on the rise worldwide, and China is eager to partake in the growing market. In the U.S. alone, sales of alternative remedies reached approximately $5 billion in 2005, according to a market study by Mintel research. Nearly 62% of American adults have used some sort of alternative medicine, which respondents “felt to overall be safer and have fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals,” according to the study.

Why the interest? The answer lies in part with demographics, according to Dr. Albert Wong, founding president of the Hong Kong-based Modernized Chinese Medicine International Association. “Wealthy, aging baby-boomers are growing disillusioned with pharmaceuticals,” he says. Advances in Western medicine have increased longevity, so patients are less likely to suffer from specific diseases, and more likely to suffer from chronic conditions like high blood pressure, cholesterol and metabolic problems. “These are conditions herbal medicines are much more capable to handle than specific synthetic drugs,” Dr. Wong asserts.”

Tags: East and West, Herbs by DAAN
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Truth about Acupuncture

“Almost everyone remembers getting shots as a child — the dreaded doctor visits that were never quite exonerated by that lollypop at the end. They were painful, they bled, they made you want to cry.

It’s understandable why many people harbor a fear of needles, and it’s even more understandable why many Americans are iffy when it comes to medical practices like acupuncture.

The good news is that acupuncture isn’t only about skin pricks, and the even better news is that acupuncture needles are neither thick nor hypodermic; they are considerably thinner than a sewing needle, thinner than tattoo needles, so thin in fact that you can spring them back and forth as you would a cat whisker.”

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ACUPUNCTURE could be the key to turning off a running nose.
“An Australian study has found the ancient Chinese needle therapy can significantly reduce the symptoms of nasal allergies, including sneezing, blocked noses, nasal itching and a runny nose.

The study by the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre of Traditional Medicine at RMIT found acupuncture could be a safe and effective treatment for persistent allergic rhinitis, which affects 16 per cent of Australians.”

Tags: Acupuncture, General, Disease by DAAN
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