Nov 13


Deepak Chopra explains why it only takes subtle changes in your behavior to have a shift in your energy

Subtle action is the most powerful tool we have to change our energy. Deepak Chopra explains how we can change the energy in our daily lives by viewing our bodies as a flowing process guided by energy.
Recently I’ve been discussing how to change your energy. Many problems—physical and mental—seem to come down to a person’s beliefs, habits, lifestyle, moods and emotions. We use the words “positive” and “negative” to describe people we know, yet modern medicine hasn’t been able to find the source of these factors. There’s plenty of data to prove that people who undergo traumatic events, such as being widowed or losing a job without warning, suffer from lowered immune response. There are countless studies linking stress and poor health.

Oct 03

Chinese medicine has been developed over the course of thousands of years. Its increasing popularity in the West is due in part to people looking for alternatives to more aggressive Western medicine as well Chinese medicine’s more individualistic view of treatment:

“Oriental medicine is based on the idea that humans are not just a collection of physical molecules, Balusik said. Instead, people are a complex and interrelated system of energies known as Qi, which is pronounced chee, she said.

Acupuncturists use a complex chart that defines pressure points in the body and how they interconnect to regulate the flow of Qi. Acupressure massage of pressure points is used on children rather than acupuncture.

Acupuncture is also successfully used in treating the effects of modern cancer treatments, alleviating pain and restoring appetite, she said.

Each treatment is used in conjunction with prescribing Chinese herbal medicines.

Many people, trying to stay away from chemicals found in modern drugs, are turning to cures found in the natural ingredients of Chinese herbal medicine.

Herbal medicines can be prescribed in tablet and liquid form, sometimes as teas, or items that can be cooked up in a soup, she said.

More than 5,000 different ingredients made from plants, animals, and minerals are used.

Chinese herbs are a good alternative to some of the drug-based anxiety remedies many doctors prescribe, she said.

A Chinese herbal formula may include up to 20 different items carefully balanced to work in unison when taken by the patient.

A special formula is created for each patient, so there can be no sharing of Chinese herbal medicine prescriptions, she noted.

Balusik said it is important that an expert in herbal medicines insure the right dose is taken, so there is no interaction between any modern drugs that might be prescribed by a doctor or over-the-counter remedies that a patient may take.

Many patients want to be able to sleep better at night or not consume so many anti-anxiety or pain-relieving medicines that they know are not good for their liver and other organs, she said.

As holistic medical practitioners, acupuncturists consider lifestyle and environmental factors when deciding the best course of treatment that includes lifestyle and nutritional recommendations along with acupuncture and herbal formulas, she said.

Sep 29

In Ann Arbor, Chinese medical doctor Dr. Yun Lu has incorporated healing foods into the products he sells at the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market. Here he explains how to use certain foods to stay healthy and balanced:

Lu described the food that the group was eating, noting that some of the items used locally grown ingredients, such as kale in the steamed vegetable buns from Tantré Farm and eggs from Holtz Farm. He talked about nature’s two main energies – yin and yang – and how different foods are linked to these energies. Eggs are a yin energy, and should be eaten in the fall – which accounted for the tea eggs that were served, hard-boiled in tea and herbs. All the ingredients are selected to help balance and heal the body’s systems, Lu said – the hot rosebud chrysanthemum tea, for example, balances the liver system.

The food is prepared in part based on family recipes that date back generations, at least to the 1600s. Lu’s family was royalty in the Manchurian Qing dynasty, which ruled from the mid-1600s to the early 1900s. Their role was to provide the emperor with food and medicine, Lu said. “So this is just an extension of the family business,” he joked.

There is a connection between the stomach and the brain, Lu said. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine look at the digestive system. In America, most people – including health professionals – don’t pay attention to their diet, he said. It’s important to take a holistic approach, looking at yin-yang balance and energy flow.

Roger Newton pointed out that the country is getting a wake-up call regarding its food system, noting that in China, most food is produced locally and with no preservatives. There are some promising signs here, however. He cited an increase in the number of local farmers markets, and a growing interest in heirloom vegetables as examples.

“I think people are becoming a lot more conscientiously conscious of what they put in their mouths,” Newton said.

Aug 27

A brain scan study illuminates how acupuncture works:

Traditional Chinese acupuncture, increasingly popular in the West for a variety of ills, eases pain by regulating key receptors in the brain, according to a new study.

The study showed that acupuncture increases the binding availability of mu-opioid receptors in regions of the brain that process and weaken pain signals — specifically the cingulate, insula, caudate, thalamus and amygdala. By directly stimulating these chemicals, acupuncture can affect the brain’s long-term ability to regulate pain, the study found.

A report on the findings is in the September issue of NeuroImage.

Using positron emission tomography scans of the brain, the researchers examined 20 women with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition. The women took no new medications for their pain during the study period.

“The increased binding availability of these receptors was associated with reductions in pain,” Richard Harris, a researcher at the University of Michigan’s Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center and a research assistant professor of anesthesiology at the University of Michigan Medical School, said in a news release from the university.

What’s more, Harris said, the findings could prompt doctors to use morphine and other opioid drugs with greater pain-killing effectiveness after treatment with acupuncture because those drugs bind to the same receptors.

Aug 22

A recent study in the US shows that a traditional Chinese herbal remedy may help arthritis pain and inflammation:

Rheumatoid arthritis is a painful condition that affects your joints. It happens when your immune system malfunctions and attacks healthy tissue, making your joints swollen and painful. Over time, this can cause permanent damage.

There are several treatments that can reduce the swelling, pain, and joint damage caused by rheumatoid arthritis. But these treatments don’t work for everyone and often cause side effects. As a result, many people look into alternative treatments, including herbal remedies.

In traditional Chinese medicine, extracts from a vine called Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F (TwHF) are often used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions that cause inflammation. (This vine is also known as lei gong teng or the thunder god vine.) In the new study, researchers explored how TwHF extract compares with a drug for rheumatoid arthritis called sulfasalazine.
What does the new study say?

The researchers found that people who took TwHF extract had greater improvement in their pain, swelling, and other symptoms than those who took sulfasalazine.

The study included 121 people with rheumatoid arthritis who had six or more painful joints. After six months, 65 percent of those taking TwHF extract had at least a 20 percent improvement in their symptoms, compared with 33 percent of those taking sulfasalazine. They also scored better on scales rating how their symptoms affected their day-to-day life, and they had lower levels of chemicals linked to inflammation in their blood.

Aug 19

Scientists at the University of Texas are studying how traditional Chinese medicine can be used to treat heart disease:

Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston are exploring how ancient Chinese herbs benefit the heart. Ancient Chinese remedies used specifically for heart disease may have artery widening properties that improve blood flow to the heart muscle.

The Chinese herbs contain three to twenty-five herbs, and are generally considered safe. Scientists in the university’s Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM) find say the herbs deliver beneficial nitric oxide to the blood vessels that lower blood pressure and improve circulation to the heart. The herbs also reduce plaque and help prevent dangerous blood clots that lead to heart attack.

Nathan S. Bryan, Ph.D., the study’s senior author and an IMM assistant professor says the study results show the Chinese herbal formulas for heart disease “have profound nitric oxide bioactivity primarily through the enhancement of nitric oxide in the inner walls of blood vessels, but also through their ability to convert nitrite and nitrate into nitric oxide.”

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) incorporates acupuncture, massage, and herbal remedies to treat disease. “TCMs have provided leads to safe medications in cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes,” said C. Thomas Caskey, M.D., IMM director and CEO. “The opportunity for Dr. Bryan’s work is outstanding given that cardiac disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the United States.”

Aug 16

An interesting report on the Sacramento Sunday morning Asian farmer’s market from a local radio station.

At 5th & Broadway, a Sunday morning farmers market grew. It’s been part of the food fabric of Broadway for 22 years, giving Asian farmers and customers a place to buy produce that’s like a country market back home.

Aug 09

Investors are looking at traditional Chinese medicines in order to create new medicines that can be sold and marketed in the west:

Despite inroads made by alternative therapies, consumers in the west still tend to view conventional medicine as offering the best remedies. Hutchison China Meditech (Chi-Med), led by Scots-born Christian Hogg, is seeking to challenge that notion by developing traditional Chinese medicine – “TCM”, as it is referred to – for western markets.

In a laboratory just outside Shanghai, he has built up a team of 200 scientists and support staff and spent $100m on research and development. The idea is to produce medicines derived from roots and herbs documented in Chinese texts, some dating back 2,000 years.

“Prospects are quite incredible,” says Hogg. “The Chinese healthcare market is growing at 20% a year, and 40% is accounted for by TCM.”

But the challenge is to crack the US and Europe, where he must break down resistance to remedies that have “worked for years in the east”. It’s an uphill task: Chi-Med’s shares have bombed since the company floated on the junior London Aim market in 2006, from a float price of 275p to 80p. In part, this is due to impatience by investors who want results sooner rather than later.

A note by Charles Stanley flagged up the fact that almost the entire value of the business, which last year generated revenue of $100m, was accounted for by TCM sales in China itself. The R&D side has yet to produce anything of significance that has received western regulatory approval, so the broker has discounted its future potential value.

Developing TCM for developed countries is made more difficult by the fact that the Chinese government is anxious to safeguard herbal patents, viewing many as part of the country’s heritage. To underline the point, Beijing recently assigned “state secret status” to up to a dozen ancient remedies.

Hogg, 43, has lived in Hong Kong for 10 years but grew up in Scotland where he studied civil engineering at Edinburgh before undertaking an MBA in the US. He was headhunted by Procter & Gamble and sent by the US consumer goods giant to China in 1995 to market the firm’s range of laundry detergents. There, he met Hutchison Whampoa’s Chinese boss, Simon To, who recruited him to Chi-Med in early 2000.

In the past 20 years, the pharmaceuticals industry has often looked for inspiration to the thousands of natural products used in traditional Chinese medicine. The best current malaria medicine is based on an ancient Chinese treatment for fevers that comes from star anise fruit, and two recent cancer drugs are derived from Camptotheca acuminata, a tree found in China.

But there is still skepticism within the industry about the scientific potential of natural products. The British Medical Association says: “It’s important that the many patients interested in exploring complementary therapy can be confident they are seeing bona fide practitioners providing treatments supported by an evidence base. Currently, osteopathy and chiropractic are the only alternative treatments fully regulated by law.”

But Hogg counters: “Our aim is to modernize and globalize traditional Chinese medicine.” He says there are 1,200 drug manufacturers across China and the industry is ripe for consolidation.

Aug 04

Traditional Chinese medicine and western medicine can be used together to compliment each other:

TRADITIONAL Chinese medicine (TCM) can be used to treat many a lifestyle ailment, but here’s the definitive word on cancer from a renowned Beijing doctor: Don’t rely on it to cure cancer.

‘The first line of defence is to see an oncologist and act on his advice, whether it’s surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy, because that’s what will deal with the tumour,’ says Yu Ren Cun, who heads the department of oncology at the Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine and is a specialist in the complementary treatment of tumours.

TCM comes in mainly as a complementary treatment, he points out, as it deals effectively with the side effects of chemo and radiotherapy. ‘TCM works well to complement Western cancer therapy so both can be used concurrently. Its strength is in regulating the body’s systems, reducing toxicity, thus increasing the efficacy of oncology treatment,’ he says.

The two medical systems have their strengths and weaknesses, which is why patients would benefit best from an integrative approach. However, the integrative TCM-Western oncology treatment approach has to be carried out by TCM cancer specialists, and not just any general TCM practitioner, Prof Yu cautions.

Trained in Western medicine, Prof Yu is among the first batch of Chinese doctors trained in both Western medicine and TCM – a practice encouraged by the Chinese government in the 1960s. After his Western medicine and then TCM training, he spent more than 40 years researching the application of TCM in cancer treatment, and is the foremost authority on it today.

Aug 01

Alternative medicine is rapidly gaining in popularity. As this report suggests, however, it’s important that you work with your physician when adding alternative therapies to your health regimen.

 
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