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Acupuncture Could Treat Hypertension

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A recently published study from researchers at USF’s College of Pharmacy and the Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine shows that acupuncture could be an effective treatment to regulating high blood pressure.

According the Dr. Shufeng Zhou, pharmaceutical sciences professor at USF and associate dean of international research, the key to regulating hypertension is in the “qi” — the body’s free- flow of energy.

“In Chinese medicine the disease of hypertension is an off-balance of qi. When the body is not in a balanced state of qi, illness can occur,” he said.

Zhou has practiced medicine all over the world, but while in China, he found that acupuncture may top other forms of treatment for hypertension. The ancient Chinese treatment consists of using tiny needles by stimulating various acupoints on the body that are associated with precise energy pathways.

While the practice is not new, some of its benefits are.

“For the first time, we found that acupuncture could be linked to antioxidant effect,” Zhou said.

According to the research reported online last month in PLOS ONE Biomedical Journal, The
seven-day study involved two groups of hypertensive rats that received a daily treatment of acupuncture.

The first group received a needle between the first and second metatarsal bones at the top of the foot, which stimulated the tai chong — an access point commonly used for stress, lower back pain and high blood pressure in acupuncture done on humans.

The other group received a needle insertion as well, but the insertion was not in one of the specific points suggested by acupuncture treatment to lower blood pressure.

While the data revealed the first group had significantly lower blood pressure, the researchers also found that the part of the brain that regulates blood pressure contained an increase of enzyme antioxidants after treatment.

The enzymes involved in processes, Zhou said, can prevent damage to the blood vessel walls caused by the free radicals, which may lead to regulating blood pressure of hypertension.

According to the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) hypertension or high blood pressure is amongst the most deadly diseases in America today and linked to multiple ailments including heart disease, strokes and kidney disease. The CDC reported in 2011 that one in three Americans live with hypertension and one and five are undiagnosed.

Dr. Yangchong Ou, an integrative medicine specialist in Tampa, has more than 25 years of experience in acupuncture.

His patients receive optimal results from acupuncture, he said, because of its natural ability to encourage healing.

“In acupuncture we don’t use drugs,” he said. “The needles don’t have drugs in them. It’s a physical treatment.”

But not everyone is an acupuncture enthusiast.

“I am always willing to try new things but I don’t like needles,” Bashia Guillard, a senior majoring in public relations said.

The discovery led to a partnership between the USF College of Pharmacy and Guangzhou.

Shefung said he thinks global medical development is a fundamental component to understanding illnesses all over the world and hopes to someday see a school of integrative medicine that would give students medical degrees in both Western medicine and Oriental medicine.

In the meantime, Zhou will continue to incorporate global treatment with modernized western approaches.

He plans to conduct another study with Dr. Dong Lin from the Fujian University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, who will visit USF on Nov. 30. The study will continue to research the enduring effects of acupuncture and attempt to understand the molecular mechanisms of the treatment.

http://www.usforacle.com/study-acupuncture-could-treat-hypertension-1.2796435#.ULT2x7Rt3Hg

Acupuncture may relieve fatigue in Breast Cancer patients

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(Reuters Health) – Acupuncture may help relieve fatigue in women who’ve had breast cancer, a new UK study suggests.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/29/us-acupuncture-cancer-idUSBRE89S15420121029

Researchers found that women who attended six weekly acupuncture sessions had greater improvements in fatigue as well as anxiety, depression and quality of life, compared to those who only received educational materials.

But that still doesn’t prove it was the needles, themselves, that boosted women’s energy levels, they said. And one cancer and alternative medicine researcher not part of the study team said the acupuncture group only showed a “modest improvement in fatigue – it was not a very remarkable, strong effect.”

Still, acupuncture could be “well worth a try” for some people, Dr. Amit Sood, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Reuters Health.

“Fatigue is the most common symptom for all cancer patients,” said Carol Enderlin, who has studied that topic at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

She said cancer and cancer treatments can cause chronic pain, psychological stress and anemia – a decrease in healthy red blood cells – all of which contribute to fatigue. In addition, people who are nauseated after chemo might not be getting the most nutritious diet for maintaining energy levels.

Enderlin, who also wasn’t involved in the new study, said acupuncture may help as an add-on therapy for women who’ve had their fatigue checked out by a doctor and tinkered with their physical activity and diet – but are still frequently tired.

Approximately one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in her life.

For the new research, Alexander Molassiotis from the University of Manchester and his colleagues tracked 227 women with moderate or severe cancer-related fatigue treated with acupuncture and another 75 fatigued women who didn’t get acupuncture.

The women had all received chemotherapy for breast cancer in the five years before the study, and most had felt chronically tired for a year or more. Participants were given a booklet about cancer-related fatigue when they started the study.

The researchers found that after six weeks, general fatigue had dropped by almost four points on a 0-20 scale among women who had acupuncture, compared to a less than one-point decline in the comparison group. That is “mild to modest” improvement, according to Sood – not enough to allow someone who is stuck in bed to start walking, but maybe enough to get people who are too tired to exercise to start doing some activity.

Anxiety and depression scores, measured from 0-21, dropped by two additional points post-acupuncture, compared to scores in women given educational materials only. Emotional and physical well-being got a greater boost with acupuncture therapy as well, Molassiotis’s team found.

The researchers couldn’t tell how much of that benefit might have been due to the “placebo effect” – women who felt better because they expected to benefit from acupuncture.

In an ideal trial, participants would get either real or fake acupuncture, without knowing which. But it’s very hard to design a convincing but ineffective fake acupuncture treatment to use for comparison, researchers noted.

According to an editorial published with the study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, close to one-third of cancer patients have persistent fatigue that may continue for years after treatment. Doctors typically encourage moderate exercise and talk therapy to improve their energy, wrote psychologist Julienne Bower, from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Still, she added, it’s unclear how well any therapies work over the long term in people with severe fatigue.

Enderlin said people who’ve been treated for cancer should make sure they’re not at high risk of bleeding or infection before considering acupuncture for fatigue.

But if they’re medically cleared, she said the alternative therapy “looks really intriguing.”

Enderlin recommended “maintaining activity to tolerance, unless there are other problems with that, good nutrition, getting adequate sleep, and if the fatigue continues, considering there might be an alternative that could complement (those things).”

SOURCE: bit.ly/gPtMdm Journal of Clinical Oncology, online October 29, 2012.

Acupuncture for Multiple Sclerosis – New Findings

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New research concludes that acupuncture “significantly improves the quality of life” for multiple sclerosis patients. Multiple sclerosis is an inflammatory disease of the brain and spinal cord that causes a wide range of symptoms including pain, numbness, visual problems, speech problems, cognitive impairment, muscle spasms and depression. Acupuncture was shown to reduce both pain and depression. In addition, acupuncture significantly improved mobility in the eyes.

Acupuncture at Yintang

Another group in the study received sham acupuncture, which only simulates acupuncture therapy. The sham acupuncture group did not show sustained improvement in pain, depression and eye mobility. By contrast, the true acupuncture group showed improvement in all three areas and also demonstrated an overall improvement in the quality of life. Other notable improvements in the acupuncture group included improved sleep and appetite. Acupuncture also reduced incontinence, constipation and leg spasms.

All participants in the study, in both the sham and true acupuncture groups, were receiving care under a doctor including the immunomodulatory drugs interferon-beta and glatiramer acetate. No subject in the study received acupuncture prior to the investigation and all subjects were randomized into a true acupuncture group and a sham acupuncture group.

The true acupuncture group received treatment at acupoints ST36 (Zusanli), SP6 (Sanyinjiao), LI4 (Hegu), LI11 (Quchi) and Yintang (EX-HN3). Electroacupuncture was applied to all points, except for Yintang, at 4 Hz with a pulse width of 0.5ms. The sham acupuncture group was needled one centimeter laterally to the true acupuncture points at a superficial needle insertion depth of less than 0.2cm with no electrical stimulation.

An interesting clinical result presented during the investigation. The sham acupuncture group showed temporary pain reduction. However, only the true acupuncture group demonstrated pain reduction measured at six months following the acupuncture treatments.
Reference:
Impact of electroacupuncture on quality of life for patients with Relapsing-Remitting Multiple Sclerosis under treatment with immunomodulators: A randomized study. Juan G Quispe-Cabanillas, Alfredo Damasceno, Felipe Glehn, Carlos O Brandão, Benito P Damasceno, Wanderley D Silveira and Leonilda M Santos. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2012, 12:209 doi:10.1186/1472-6882-12-209. Published: 5 November 2012.

 

http://www.healthcmi.com/index.php/acupuncturist-news-online/643-acupunctureceumultiplesclerosispaindepression

Cancer Patients May Benefit from Acupuncture to Relieve Fatigue, Anxiety

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By Denise Reynolds RD on November 5, 2012 – 12:30pm  for eMaxHealt

Cancer-related fatigue is one of the most common side effects of both the disease and its treatments. The sometimes disabling lack of energy can be caused by many factors, so in cases where the underlying cause cannot be eliminated, acupuncture may provide patients some relief.

According to the 2007 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), more than one-third of all adults (about 38%) had used some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). A special analysis of the data shows that CAM use is more prevalent in patients with cancer. About 40% of cancer survivors use a complementary health practice as they want to do everything they can to combat the disease, manage its symptoms and cope with the side effects of treatment. The most popular practices among cancer survivors were herbal and other natural products such as dietary supplements (20%), deep breathing (14%), and meditation (9%).

Acupuncture, though an ancient Traditional Chinese medicine, is today often used in cancer care for pain reduction and to improve nausea for those receiving chemotherapy. The technique is believed to boost the activity of the body’s natural painkillers and increase blood flow.

The latest study, conducted on patients with breast cancer, found an improvement in feelings of fatigue and anxiety as well. Alex Molassiotis RN PhD of the University of Manchester in England recruited 302 volunteers diagnosed with breast cancer. Seventy-five of the patients received the standard care, while the remainder received acupuncture in addition to their regular medical treatments. Treatment was delivered by acupuncturists once a week for six weeks.

At the end of the study, the patients who received acupuncture showed improvements in the “General Fatigue” score on the Multidimensional Fatigue Inventory (MFI). They also reported less pain, less anxiety and depression, and an improved quality of life.

“I am quite excited with these results. They provide some good evidence of an effect of acupuncture for the management of a very debilitating and burdensome symptom for patients,” said Dr. Molassiotis. “Acupuncture is a complementary therapy that not only can have direct effects on the symptom experience of patients, but also … provide the opportunity [for] patients to be more involved with their symptom management and empower them more.

Complications from acupuncture are very rare, as long as the acupuncturist uses sterile needles and proper procedures. Because chemotherapy and radiation therapy weaken the body’s immune system, cancer patients who are undergoing these therapies should be sure that the acupuncturist follows strict clean-needle procedures and he or she should use new disposable (single-use) needles for each patient.

Journal Reference:
A. Molassiotis et al. Acupuncture for Cancer-Related Fatigue in Patients With Breast Cancer: A Pragmatic Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Clinical Oncology. Published online before print October 29, 2012, doi:10.1200/JCO.2012.41.6222

 

http://www.emaxhealth.com/1506/cancer-patients-may-benefit-acupuncture-relieve-fatigue-anxiety

 

Acupuncture for Aging Dogs

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Acupuncture a growing treatment for aging dogs

 by MICHELLE BOUDIN / NBC

Posted on November 1, 2012 at 7:20 PM

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Most of us would do anything for the family pet.  But acupuncture?  Yep, it’s becoming more and more popular as a way to treat animals.

Like most dogs, Henry is almost always up for a game of catch.  Just a few days ago, though, his owner says he wasn’t up for much.

“It’s heartbreaking but he’s doing well, like I said, he’s 14 and he still walks a mile-and-a-half every week.  But when he starts to slow down I bring him in.  I jokingly call this a tune up,” said Lisa Johnson, Henry’s owner.

The tune up? Doggie acupuncture.

Dr. Kim Hombs has been doing acupuncture on pets for years and says it’s becoming more and more common.  She spends a few minutes inserting strategically placed needles in the patient.

“For instance, there’s one that is two behind the ribcage called the kidney points, which doesn’t sound like it would have to do with the back but in Chinese medicine kidney meridian has to do with bone strength back strength,” Dr Hombs said.

She says the ancient Chinese medicine can be used to treat all kinds of issues, from anxiety to hip and bone problems.

“We let those needles sit for 20 minutes then we come back and take them out,” she explained.

And though it looks like it hurts, she says it really doesn’t.

Charlene Mangione actually gets acupuncture for herself and for her cocker spaniel Tigger.

“He’s like a different dog and he’s almost 13 years old,” Mangione said.  “He’s an old man.”

She said the effects are almost immediate.

“When I get home today he’ll want to drag me around the neighborhood.”

Kind of like Henry.

“The goal is quality of life,” Henry’s owner said.  “We want him to be as happy and healthy as long as he can.”

 

http://www.king5.com/news/pets-and-animals/Acupuncture-a-growing-treatment-for-aging-dogs-176890321.html

Hello Stacy Kluck

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We have been joined by Stacy Kluck, Licensed Acupuncturist who has just moved back to Iowa City from Chicago. She has been practicing there as well as teaching at the acupuncture school and acting as assistant dean of students. Stacy is really enthusiastic, loves Chinese medicine, is expert in herbology as well as the Five Phase approach to acupuncture, and is really brightening things up at the clinic. She has brought a whole new feel to the clinic and is stimulating everyone to think in new ways about our medicine and what we can do for people. It is great to have a young enthusiastic Chinese medicine fanatic among us, as well as such a hard working, generous spirit. We are looking forward to helping LOTS of people with our new team. Thanks Stacy

Acupuncture for COPD

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Study: Acupuncture may help some people with COPD

Published May 16, 2012

Reuters

Three months of acupuncture improved breathing problems in people with chronic lung disease, in a new study from Japan.

According to one researcher, the benefits seen with the alternative treatment were on par with, or better than, what’s been shown for conventional drugs and exercises used to treat the disease. But the study was small, he added, and more research will be needed to convince doctors and policymakers of acupuncture’s usefulness.

“We don’t know if this is going to extend life, but the study suggests it improves quality of life,” said Dr. George Lewith, from the University of Southampton in England.

“If I had enough money and I was the patient, I would give acupuncture a try.”

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, is irreversible impairment of lung function, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis, often caused by smoking. One large national health survey suggested 24 million Americans have the condition, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Shortness of breath is one of the main symptoms of COPD. Typical treatment includes steroids and bronchodilators, as well as breathing exercises.

Because of that, it’s not totally surprising that an alternative therapy known to promote relaxation would help patients with breathing problems, according to Lewith.

“What acupuncture does is it seems to relax all the muscles around the chest wall,” said Lewith, who wrote a commentary published with the new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“It’s absolutely consistent with what we’re trying to do conventionally, which is help with their breathing exercises and their relaxation techniques.”

Study included ‘fake’ acupuncture

The new findings are based on 68 patients treated with real or fake acupuncture. More robust studies will be needed before health insurance companies and programs like Medicare, for example, start funding acupuncture for this group, Lewith said.

For this study, researchers led by Masao Suzuki from Kyoto University in Japan randomly spilt patients with COPD and trouble breathing into two groups.

Half of them had weekly acupuncture sessions, with needles placed at points on the arms, stomach, back, chest and legs that have been tied to asthma and other lung problems. Participants in the comparison group went through similar sessions but with sham acupuncture treatment — when practitioners use needles that don’t actually pierce the skin.

All patients were allowed to stay on whatever medications they were already taking.

Before starting treatment and at the end of the 12 weeks, patients did a standard six-minute walking test when researchers measured how far they got in that time and how much breathing trouble they had doing it.

Breathlessness was assessed on a standard 10-point scale, with 10 representing the most difficulty breathing.

In the real acupuncture group, shortness of breath was initially rated at 5.5 out of 10 after walking. After 12 weeks of treatment, that fell to 1.9. The average distance those patients were able to walk in six minutes also improved, from about 370 meters to 440 meters.

In the comparison group, breathlessness scores held steady — at 4.2 before treatment and 4.6 after — and there was no improvement in patients’ walk distance.

“In a disease like COPD, we need to expand our thinking and come up with varying strategies to improve quality of life and relieve breathlessness,” said Dr. Ravi Kalhan, head of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine’s asthma and COPD program in Chicago.

Some patients respond better to conventional medications than others, he said — and it’s promising that people in the new study seemed to benefit from acupuncture over and above the effect of those drugs.

Costs of acupuncture vary widely by location and practitioner, but a single session can run for about $100 and is often not covered by insurance. That may not be feasible for typical COPD patients, according to Lewith, who are often older and working class.

But for people who can spare the cost, the researchers agreed there’s nothing stopping them from trying out the alternative therapy.

“For me, as long as the therapy is safe and someone wants to try it and it might help and won’t hurt, I absolutely encourage it,” Kalhan, who wasn’t involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/05/16/study-acupuncture-may-help-some-people-with-copd/#ixzz1vcjaPwxA

Research is Positive on Chinese Herbals for Cancer

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There’s growing acceptance that herbal medicines could be effective for medical conditions, but the scientific evidence to vault such a treatment into an approved drug is often lacking. As Shirley Wang explains on Lunch Break, researchers are making progress on a cancer treatment based on a common herbal combination in Chinese medicine.

Scientists studying a four-herb combination discovered some 1,800 years ago by Chinese herbalists have found that the substance enhances the effectiveness of chemotherapy in patients with colon cancer.

Photo Researchers Inc.Early studies show a traditional four-herb combination has cancer-treatment benefits. The herbs are Chinese peony (pictured), Chinese jujube, Chinese licorice and baikal skullcap.

The mixture, known in China as huang qin tang, has been shown in early trials to be effective at reducing some side effects of chemotherapy, including diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. The herbs also seem to bolster colon-cancer treatment: Tests on animals with tumors have shown that administering the herbs along with chemotherapy drugs restored intestinal cells faster than when chemo was used alone.

The herb combination, dubbed PHY906 by scientists, is a rare example of a plant-based product used in traditional folk medicine that could potentially jump the hurdle into mainstream American therapy. A scientific team led by Yung-Chi Cheng, an oncology researcher at Yale University, and funded in part by the National Cancer Institute, is planning to begin Phase II clinical trials to study PHY906’s effectiveness in people with colon cancer.

Photo Researchers Inc.Chinese jujube

Many conventional medications are derived from individual chemical agents originally found in plants. In the case of huang qin tang, however, scientists so far have identified 62 active chemicals in the four-herb combination that apparently need to work together to be effective.

“What Dr. Cheng is doing is keeping [the herbal combination] as a complex entity and using that as an agent,” says Josephine Briggs, head of the federal National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which is helping fund some of the PHY906 research. “It’s polypharmacy,” or the equivalent of several drugs being administered at once.

Dr. Cheng began his research on huang qin tang about a dozen years ago when he sought a better way of dealing with the chemotherapy’s side effects. A variety of medications are currently used to treat these symptoms, but with varying success. A more effective technique could improve patients’ quality of life and possibly allow them to tolerate a larger dose of chemo, which might speed up their course of treatment, he says.

Dr. Cheng, who grew up in Taiwan, turned to Chinese traditional medicine, which often touts holistic treatments and multiple health claims for a single herb. In herbal literature he found mention of huang qin tang, a herbal combination traditionally used in China for gastrointestinal problems, and decided to test whether it could help cancer patients without compromising the effectiveness of the chemotherapy.

San Diego Botanic GardenChinese licorice

The research team began by giving mice with colon cancer high doses of irinotecan, a chemotherapy drug. Some of the mice also received varying doses of PHY906, the herbal combination. After four days, the animals that got the herbs seemed to experience fewer side effects. The herbs also appeared to improve the efficacy of the chemo, restoring damaged intestinal cells faster than with chemo alone and allowing the mice to tolerate doses of the drug that otherwise might have been lethal.

They followed with another experiment treating animals in four groups. One group received just the chemotherapy drug, another received just PHY906, a third group got both and the last group got nothing. The herb and drug combination worked the best at reducing side effects. As the researchers expected, PHY906 had no impact on the cancer when used by itself.

Further testing showed that PHY906’s effectiveness was diminished if any of the four herbs was eliminated, indicating that there is an apparent synergistic effect between them. This finding “got me serious about [PHY906],” says Dr. Cheng. The work was published in the journal Science and Translational Medicine in 2010. By submitting PHY906 to the scientific rigor of clinical trials, Dr. Cheng aims to win regulatory approval for the compound’s use in cancer treatment.

One challenge with using herbal medicines is that the ratio of the chemicals they contain isn’t consistent when plants are grown under different conditions. After testing various suppliers, Dr. Cheng ended up creating a biotechnology company sponsored by Yale called PhytoCeutica to carefully monitor growing conditions to ensure plants from different batches were pharmacologically consistent and to continue clinical development of the compound.

University of British Columbia Botanical GardenBaikal skullcap

Why PHY906 works isn’t entirely clear, Dr. Cheng says. The herbal combination appears to have an anti-inflammatory effect on the gastrointestinal tract, according to work the group published in the journal BMC Medical Genomics last year. Dr. Cheng says he believes PHY906 works in at least three different ways in the body to control the side effects of chemotherapy, whereas conventional treatments work in just a single way.

So far, research data seem to support Dr. Cheng’s hunch about traditional medicine. “If it’s still in use after a thousand years there must be something right,” he says.

Write to Shirley S. Wang at shirley.wang@wsj.com

Deceptive Warm Fall Days

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It seems very warm here in Iowa, actually, the daily temps are about 20 degrees higher than normal for our area. So we are all wearing shorts and flip flops. But in the clinic we are seeing lots of colds and intestinal bugs circulating. People always say that after school starts everyone gets sick.

This is interesting to me, because in Chinese medicine, sickness is caused by having ‘wind’ enter the body, go deeply, and disrupt health. They say that the wind comes into points such as those under the back of your head at the top of your neck. Those are the places where you get a stiff neck when you first get a cold.

In China, they would say that even though it feels hot these days, it really is fall, and we should keep our necks covered to keep out the cold wind. It really is cold, underneath this heat, they might say. We should dress more warmly, wear more outerwear, and perhaps even a scarf around the neck.

I wonder if we would see fewer colds in the fall if people lived by these ideas.

But I’m not ready to bundle up yet. We’ve had the clinic windows open and air conditioning on in the hot afternoons. But I might just wear a scarf when I am outside during these deceptively warm days.

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