Jan 18

Acupuncture effective in providing relief for arthritis patients

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Acupuncutre has shown to be effective in providing relief for those who suffer from arthritis.

Newark resident Ann Monske slipped on ice and fell in January 2009.

The 76-year-old went through rehabilitation with spinal decompression all summer long, but the pain remained intense. Because of her osteoarthritis — which she has had for more than 10 years — and her allergy to many pain medications, Monske looked for alternative methods to treat her pain.

Her massage therapist told her about acupuncture, and Monske did her homework. Soon, she was convinced it would help her. She had to travel to Canal Winchester until she found local acupuncturist Lisa Hicks. Monske started going for treatment three times a week, but now is down to once every three weeks.

“I believe her skill in treating me has a great deal to do with it (my pain relief),” Monske said. “She knows where to put the needles, and it is relatively pain-free and very relaxing. She is a wonderful find for me.”

Instead of relying solely on pain pills and steroids, a few alternative treatments are available that might help to relieve arthritis pain, including acupuncture, which involves pricking the skin or tissues with needles to alleviate pain or treat certain conditions.

Hicks is quick to point out acupuncture does not cure arthritis but is effective in treating chronic pain, such as pain caused by headaches, arthritis, shingles, spastic colon and colitis.

“Arthritis is not a treatable disease,” Hicks said. “We treat the symptoms. Acupuncture does not heal the body. It jump starts it to heal itself.”

Hicks found about acupuncture through her own experience of dealing with chronic pain from a hand and shoulder injury. She was in so much pain she couldn’t even open a bottle or turn a key.

After 14 acupuncture treatments, she realized she was going to get better. She said her accident was the best thing that happened to her because it changed her life and her career.

After dealing with arthritis in his joints and lower back for 10 years, Bill Redmond, 49, of Newark, tried chiropractors, massage therapy, back decompressions and medication, to no avail.

His wife started going to Hicks for migraines and suggested he go, too.

“I can definitely feel a difference,” Redmond said. “Acupuncture makes my pain manageable.”

Hicks graduated in 2008 from the American Institute of Alternative Medicine with a five-year degree. But she still is working to get the word out about the treatment.

“Ohio hasn’t adopted acupuncture because it is still too new, even though it has been around for 4,500 years,” Hicks said. “You have to keep an open mind. If a closed mind says something is not going to work, no matter what it is, it won’t work.”

During an acupuncture session, Hicks will swab each acu-point area with alcohol before tapping a hair-thin, metal needle into the site. The needles are so thin that several acupuncture needles can go into the middle of a hypodermic needle.

The number of needles used during treatment can vary and are placed at various depths. They are placed under the skin in carefully determined points on the body. After inserted, the needles stay in place for several minutes or up to an hour. Hicks energizes the needles electrically to intensify the effect of the treatment.

Ed Monroe, 63, of Jacksontown, has arthritis in his shoulders and back. He had physical therapy for eight weeks and three shots of cortisone, which didn’t help. He was in so much pain that he had to do something, so he started going to Hicks after a friend told him about his experience in Mexico.

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Jan 18

Acupuncture may cut hot flahses and increase sex drive in breast cancer patients

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According to a recent study, acupuncture may cut hot flahses and enhance sex drive in breast cancer patients.

Acupuncture is just as good as standard medication to ease hot flashes and other uncomfortable symptoms in women undergoing breast cancer treatment.

And as an added bonus, the needle treatment may boost the patient’s sex drive and contribute to clearer thinking.

“I think the data shows you that acupuncture is a good option for these patients [and] it has no side effects,” added Dr. Eleanor Walker, division director of breast services in the department of radiation oncology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, and lead author of a study appearing online Dec. 28 in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

But another expert warned against taking the findings too seriously at this stage.

“It’s provocative but the problem is it’s a small number of patients and, having participated in research trials in vasomotor [hot flashes, night sweats, etc.] symptoms in women, it’s a field that has a large placebo effect,” said Dr. Jay Brooks, chairman of hematology/oncology at Ochsner Health System in Baton Rouge. “It needs to have a bigger trial.”

Prior studies have shown that acupuncture can reduce hot flashes in postmenopausal women without breast cancer.

All of these studies, however, compared acupuncture to sham acupuncture, not to commonly used drugs, Walker noted. This is the first randomized controlled study to compare acupuncture alongside medication.

Many women with breast cancer receive anti-estrogen hormone therapy, usually for as long as five years, in addition to other treatments.

Although hormone therapy is effective in reducing tumor recurrence, it does cause hot flashes and night sweats.

The antidepressant Effexor (venlafaxine) is the most commonly used therapy for relieving these symptoms, but the drug brings its own problems, namely dry mouth, reduced appetite, nausea and constipation.

“We need something that’s accessible that doesn’t add adverse effects,” Walker said.

For this study, 50 women with breast cancer were randomly assigned to receive 12 weeks of acupuncture (twice a week for four weeks then once a week) or daily Effexor. They were followed for a year.

Initially, both groups of women experienced similar reductions (about 50 percent) in hot flashes and depression, with an overall improvement in quality of life.

But the acupuncture benefits were longer lived. Two weeks out, women taking the antidepressant saw a resurgence in hot flashes while women in the acupuncture arm continued to have far fewer problems.

About 25 percent of women receiving acupuncture also reported more interest in sex while many also reported more energy and clearer thinking.

How might acupuncture work its magic? One expert had a theory.

Acupuncture operates as a balancing mechanism, said Janet Konefal, a licensed acupuncturist and assistant dean of complementary and integrative medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “It is a regulator for the systems of the body,” she explained. “It doesn’t add or take anything — it simply increases activity or decreases activity depending upon the points used. In this situation, it helped regulate the endocrine system, thus helping to balance the activity of hormones, neurotransmitters, and other biochemical reactions that regulate the body.”

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Jan 16

Acupuncture shown to offer relief for eczema sufferers

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For eczema sufferers, acupuncture may offer relief that has long been elusive to many who suffer from it.

An acupuncture session may bring some itch relief to people with the allergic skin condition known as atopic eczema, a preliminary study suggests.

Eczema is a general term for conditions marked by inflammation and dry, red, itchy patches on the skin. The most common form, atopic eczema, is seen in people with a predisposition to allergies, like hay fever or asthma.

In the new study, German researchers looked at the short-term effects of acupuncture on skin inflammation and itching in 30 people with atopic eczema. They found that the therapy, when done minutes after patients’ skin was exposed to an allergen—either pollen or dust mites—appeared to soothe subjective feelings of itchiness.

In addition, when patients were exposed to the allergen for a second time shortly after the acupuncture session, they tended to have a less-severe skin reaction, the researchers report in the journal Allergy.

The findings show that in this “experimental setting,” acupuncture seems to ease the itch of atopic eczema, lead researcher Dr. Florian Pfab, of the Technical University of Munich, told Reuters Health in an e-mail. The study does not, however, answer the question of whether acupuncture as practiced in the real world would have similar benefits.

For the study, Pfab and his colleagues looked at all 30 patients under three different test conditions. In one, patients had their skin exposed to either pollen or dust-mite allergens, then received true, or “point-specific,” acupuncture, in which needles were placed in traditional acupuncture points that, according to Chinese medicine, are related to itchy skin.

In another condition, the allergen exposure was followed by “placebo-point” acupuncture, where the needles were inserted into skin areas not used in traditional Chinese medicine. In the third condition, patients received no treatment.

Overall, Pfab’s team found, patients’ itchiness ratings were lower after they received true acupuncture, compared with both no treatment and placebo acupuncture. Then, when the researchers exposed patients’ skin to the allergens a second time, skin flare-ups tended to be less-severe following the point-specific acupuncture. As for itchiness, however, both the true and placebo therapies had similar benefits compared with no treatment.

Acupuncture has been used for more than 2,000 years in Chinese medicine to treat a wide variety of ailments. According to traditional medicine, specific acupuncture points on the skin are connected to internal pathways that conduct energy, or qi (“chee”), and stimulating these points with a fine needle promotes the healthy flow of qi.

Modern research has suggested that acupuncture may help ease pain by altering signals among nerve cells or affecting the release of various chemicals of the central nervous system. Pfab explained that pain and itchiness have similarities in their underlying mechanisms, so acupuncture’s effects on pain mechanisms may also account for the benefits seen in this study. The researcher pointed out, however, that more research is needed to see whether and why acupuncture might be helpful for people with eczema.

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Jan 15

Green tea may reduce lung cancer in smokers

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More benefits of drinking green tea have been revealed in a recent study; it may reduce lung cancer even for smokers.

For thousands of years, the people of China, Japan, India, and Thailand have consumed green tea and used it medicinally to treat everything from headaches to flatulence. In fact, the ancient Chinese proverb, “better to be deprived of food for three days, than tea for one,” gives us an idea of how much they believed in its curative abilities. Over the past few decades, however, research in both Asia and the West has begun providing scientific evidence of green tea’s numerous health benefits.

As a whole, studies indicate that regular consumption of green tea may slow or prevent conditions including high cholesterol, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis, impaired immune disease and liver disease. In addition, some studies have indicated green tea may have cancer-fighting properties, lowering the rate of gastric, esophageal, and mouth cancers. And in a conference this week sponsored by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC), researchers reported that Taiwanese smokers who consumed one cup of green tea each day significantly reduced their chances of developing lung cancer.

For their study, Dr. I-Hsin Lin, of Chung Shan Medical University in Taiwan, and her colleagues recruited 170 people with lung cancer and 340 healthy patients as controls. The participants completed questionnaires regarding their lifestyle habits, including how much they smoked, how much green tea they drank, their dietary intake of fruits and vegetables, cooking practices and family history of lung cancer. They also underwent genotyping on insulin-like growth factors: IGF1, IGF2, and IGFBP3, all of which have been reported to be associated with cancer risk.

The results showed that both smokers and non-smokers who did not drink green tea were 5 times more likely to develop lung cancer compared to those who drank at least one cup of green tea per day. Smokers who did not drink green tea at all were more than 12 times more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than those who drank at least one cup of green tea per day. However, the protection was greatest for those carrying certain genes. Green tea drinkers, whether smokers or non-smokers, with non-susceptible IGF1 (CA)19/(CA)19 and (CA)19/X genotypes reported a 66 percent reduction in lung cancer risk compared with green tea drinkers carrying the IGF1 X/X genotype.

Jan 15

Acupuncture can ease hot flashes

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A recent study have found that acupuncture can greatly ease hot flashes in women undergoing treatment for breast cancer.

NEW YORK – A new study provides more evidence that acupuncture can help ease hot flashes in women with breast cancer who are being treated with the “anti-estrogen” drug tamoxifen. Acupuncture, researchers found, is free of side effects and has a side benefit for some women: an increased sex drive.

“Acupuncture appears to be at least as effective as drug therapy,” Dr. Eleanor M. Walker of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and her colleagues report, “and it may provide additional and longer-term benefits without adverse effects.”

Breast cancer patients with estrogen-sensitive tumors are typically given estrogen-blocking drugs for years at a time. These drugs, which include tamoxifen, bring on menopausal symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats.

The antidepressant drug Effexor (venlafaxine) is the standard treatment for these symptoms, Walker and her team note in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, but it can have unpleasant side effects, including dry mouth, nausea, and constipation. Non-drug treatments with few or no side effects are “urgently needed,” they add.

To investigate whether acupuncture might be an option, Walker and her team randomly assigned 25 women to receive Effexor or acupuncture for 12 weeks, following them for up to year after the end of treatment.

Both treatments reduced hot flashes, night sweats, and symptoms of depression to a similar degree, and also significantly improved mental health, the researchers found. But within two weeks after treatment ended, women in the Effexor group saw their hot flashes increase; this didn’t happen in the acupuncture group.

Eighteen women in the Effexor group had side effects, such as dizziness and anxiety, while none of the women given acupuncture had such side effects. About a quarter of the women given acupuncture said their sex drive had increased. “Most women also reported an improvement in their energy, clarity of thought, and sense of well-being,” Walker and her team note.

The researchers also point out that Effexor could impair the effectiveness of tamoxifen in some patients, because it can block the body’s metabolism of the drug.

Acupuncture, they conclude, is a “safe, effective and durable treatment” for hot flashes and other menopausal symptoms stemming from anti-estrogen hormone therapy in women with breast cancer. They hope this study will “lead to a change in the pattern of practice” of treating these symptoms in patients with breast cancer.

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Jan 11

Acupuncture can reduce breast cancer treatment symptoms

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A recent study have found that acupuncture can greatly reduce the symptoms resulting from breast cancer treatment.

Aside from skin cancer, breast cancer is the most common cancer among American women, and the second leading cause of death in women. The American Cancer Society estimates that the chance of a woman getting breast cancer at some point during her life is slightly less than 1 in 8, and the chance of dying from breast cancer is about 1 in 35. However, as a result of early detection and vast improvements in treatment over the past two decades, breast cancer death rates have been decreasing. Today in America, there are more than 2.5 million survivors.

Although each person’s treatment will be slightly different, it most often involves some combination of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, followed by five years of hormone therapy and drugs like tamoxifen, which counters the effects of hormones. These treatments often cause uncomfortable and sometimes debilitating side effects, including decreased sexual desire and in younger women, early menopause—hot flashes, night sweats and mood swings. Venlafaxine, an antidepressant drug also known as Effexor, has been the treatment of choice for women undergoing breast cancer treatments, but it comes with its own set of side effects: dry mouth, decreased appetite, nausea and constipation. However, researchers say there is another option for these patients; one that works as well as drugs, without the side effects—acupuncture.

Previous studies have shown that acupuncture can reduce hot flashes in healthy postmenopausal women. So, researchers decided to find out if it could also benefit premenopausal women being treated for breast cancer. “We need something that’s accessible that doesn’t add adverse effects,” said Dr. Eleanor Walker, division director of breast services in the department of radiation oncology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. For the study, 50 women with breast cancer were randomly chosen to receive either 12 weeks of acupuncture (twice a week for four weeks then once a week) or daily Effexor. They were followed for a year.

Initially, both groups experienced a similar reduction (about 50 percent) in hot flashes, depression and other menopausal symptoms as well as improvement in mental health. But two weeks after treatment stopped, hot flashes increased in the antidepressant group but remained minimal in the acupuncture group. It wasn’t until three months after the last treatment that hot flashes began to return for those receiving acupuncture. Additionally, about 25 percent of women receiving acupuncture reported better sex drive and many reported increased energy and clearer thinking. Adverse effects, including nausea, headache, difficulty sleeping and dizziness were reported by the antidepressant users, whereas no adverse effects were reported with acupuncture. “Acupuncture offers patients a safe, effective and durable treatment option for hot flashes, something that affects the majority of breast cancer survivors,” Walker said. “Compared to drug therapy, acupuncture has benefits, as opposed to more side effects.”

Jan 08

Headache treatments

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Acupuncture is one of the four treatments that have been found to be effective in treating headaches.

The feeling is familiar: a band cinching your skull, a dull ache in the back of your neck. It’s a tension headache, and it’s by far the most common type—about 90 percent of women and 70 percent of men will experience one during their lifetime. Neurologists don’t completely understand the reason your head hurts, but they do know that many headaches are linked to stress, contraction of the neck muscles, poor sleep, and, in women, monthly hormonal fluctuations. Which is why most headache experts recommend relaxation techniques, exercise, limiting caffeine and alcohol (which interfere with sleep), and, for women, discussing birth control pills with a gynecologist. Here, four approaches to treating headaches.

Neurology
The first thing a neurologist would do is order a CT scan or MRI to rule out potentially serious causes such as a tumor, aneurysm, or stroke, says Marc Sharfman, MD, director of the Headache and Neurological Treatment Institute in Longwood, Florida. If those are ruled out, then, besides the nondrug treatments above, Sharfman might suggest biofeedback: He connects patients to devices that monitor muscle tension, blood pressure, and heart rate, then has them practice breathing patterns to identify what helps them relax. Drugs—over-the-counter and prescription—are part of a neurologist’s arsenal, but Sharfman notes that patients do best by combining nondrug approaches with minimal medication use.

Acupuncture
A primary goal for an acupuncturist is to wean the patient off prescription and over-the-counter painkillers that can trigger rebound headaches (people who regularly take these medications can suffer a headache as soon as the pills wear off), says Daniel Hsu, a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine and founder of New York AcuHealth, an acupuncture clinic. Acupuncture can help patients relax as well as transition off medications; what’s more, a recent review of research found that the technique could halve the number of days a month a person experiences head pain.

Homeopathy
Along with prescribing a remedy for the headache, a homeopath will typically offer advice on improving diet or, say, reducing exposure to chemicals in the environment, says Dana Ullman, who runs Homeopathic Educational Services in Berkeley. Because homeopaths believe the body’s response to an illness is the correct one, they give heavily diluted substances—often the herbs nux vomica and belladonna for headaches—that are supposed to mimic the patient’s symptoms, thereby helping the body defend and heal itself. (Though these two herbs are poisonous, the doses contain no toxins.) Often, the patient can begin to feel much better after one treatment, Ullman says.

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Jan 04

Acupuncture eases eczema

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Acupuncture can lessen the itchiness that comes with a skin condition, eczema.

An acupuncture session may relieve itching in those with an allergic skin condition known as atopic eczema.

Eczema is a general term for conditions marked by inflammation and dry, red, itchy patches on the skin. The most common form, atopic eczema, is seen in people with a predisposition to allergies, like hay fever or asthma. Acupuncture has been used for more than 2,000 years in Chinese medicine to treat a wide variety of ailments. According to traditional medicine, specific acupuncture points on the skin are connected to internal pathways that conduct energy, or qi (“chee”), and stimulating these points with a fine needle promotes the healthy flow of qi.

Researchers looked at the short-term effects of acupuncture on skin inflammation and itching in 30 people with atopic eczema in Germany under three different test conditions. In one, patients had their skin exposed to either pollen or dust-mite allergens, then received true, or point-specific, acupuncture – in which needles were placed in traditional acupuncture points that, according to
Chinese medicine, are related to itchy skin. In another situation, the allergen exposure was followed by placebo-point acupuncture, where the needles were inserted into skin areas not used in traditional Chinese medicine. In the third situation, patients received no treatment.

It was found that overall patients’ itchiness ratings were lower after they received true acupuncture, compared with both no treatment and placebo acupuncture. Then, when the researchers exposed patients’ skin to the allergens a second time, skin flare-ups tended to be less-severe following the point-specific acupuncture. As for itchiness, however, both the true and placebo therapies had similar benefits compared with no treatment.

Modern research has suggested that acupuncture may help ease pain by altering signals among nerve cells or affecting the release of various chemicals of the central nervous system. The researchers explained that pain and itchiness have similarities in their underlying mechanisms, so acupuncture’s effects on pain mechanisms may also account for the benefits seen in this study.

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Jan 03

Green tea and cancer

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A recent study provides more evidence that drinking green tea regularly can reduce one’s risk to cancer.

A new U.S. study has shown that green tea may help reduce the risk of oral cancer, although scientists are reluctant to officially endorse green tea as an effective way of cancer prevention.

The study was published in the November issue of the Cancer Prevention Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.

Researchers at the University of Texas’ Anderson Cancer Center assessed clinical response of green tea in oral pre-malignant lesions and found 58.8 percent of patients at the highest doses displayed clinical response, compared with 18.2 percent among those taking placebo.

They also observed a handful of biomarkers that may be important in predicting cancer development.

During the study, patients were followed for 27.5 months and atthe end of the study period, 15 of them developed oral cancers.

Patients with mild to moderate dysplasia had a longer time to develop an oral cancer if they took green tea extract, but there was no difference in oral cancer development overall between those who took green tea and those who did not.

Although encouraged by the results, lead researcher Vassiliki Papadimitrakopoulo, a professor of medicine, cautioned against any recommendation that green tea could definitely prevent cancer.

“We cannot with certainty claim prevention benefits from a trial this size,” said Papadimitrakopoulo.

“More long-term research including studies in individuals at high risk is still needed to answer that sort of question.”

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Dec 29

Colds and flu remedies for kids

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The cold and flu season is upon us; here are some home remedies to help your kids.

You tried to prevent it, but your child caught a cold or even the flu. Now you have a miserable kid on your hands.

There are ways to help your youngster feel better without over-the-counter medicines. Kathi Kemper, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Complementary and Integrative Medicine, offers these home remedies to relieve some of the symptoms.

Sore throat. Make a cup of warm tea with honey and lemon. Use herbal teas with slippery elm or cherry bark, or Yogi Throat Comfort tea, which you can find in supermarkets.

Cough. Offer mints for your child to suck on; menthol is soothing.

Stuffy nose. You don’t need to buy a humidifier. Have your child eat dinner leaning over a steaming bowl of pasta or soup. And tuck extra pillows under his head while he sleeps to help relieve nasal congestion.

Sleeplessness. Put chamomile or lavender fragrances into a warm bath. The steam from the bath also helps soothe nasal dryness.

Fever. If your child is alternating between hot and cold, dress him in layers so he can adjust as needed.

Headaches. Use a cool, damp towel on his forehead. The cool temperature shrinks dilated blood vessels.

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