So Long, Laura McCoy
Laura McCoy has resigned from Acupuncture of Iowa. We thank her for her year and a half of fun, education, and sharing. We helped lots of people and learned a lot together. Best Wishes, LM, from the staff.
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Acupuncture for COPD
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.
Research is Positive on Chinese Herbals for Cancer
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
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.
Dr. Terry Wahls Nutrition at our Clinic
Laura M and Laura C recently attended a lecture by Dr. Wahls about the nutritional advice she offers to people suffering from chronic illness. We were interested in the fact that much of what she recommends overlaps with what we heard from Paul Pitchford (author of Healing with Whole Foods) at his seminar last month. And, of course, it is very much in line with what we have been teaching patients here at our clinic and using in our own food-lives.
What we are talking about is the fact that the human species evolved as hunter-gatherer, for the most part, for millions of years. They did not become grain farmers until quite recently. That means that human health is best suited to a diet largely made up of vegetables of all kinds, with fruit to a lesser degree, and small amounts of meat.
This is exactly what we tell our patients. And it goes completely against what most of the diet folks say, against what the American food industry says, what commercials say, what many books say, and so on.
This diet requires that you spend time in the kitchen preparing your food and doing some planning ahead. It also requires that you learn new cooking techniques and recipes. More than anything, for most people, it means that you must learn to enjoy new flavors of REAL FOOD.
Some people might call it a gourmet diet, with the unusual array of vegetables, meats and grains that are used. In fact, it can be very elegant, tasty, and just as satisfying as any great meal. Maybe even more satisfying, because the body feels truly nourished.
Dr. Wahls has created a foundation to raise money for her research into using this type of diet, along with other therapies, to help people with severe forms of MS such as she has. We are supporting her efforts by making available her book, “Minding my Mitochondria” for sale at our clinic. In it is her personal success story as well as a group of some of the most tasty whole foods recipes I’ve ever tried. I’m sure they will go over well in any home.
We are also available for nutritional consultations using an Oriental medicine model. We have a lot of experience and enthusiasm for whole foods and will make every effort to guide folks with suggestions and recipes in their search for great health.
Healing Through Whole Foods
We just got back from a two day workshop with Paul Pitchford, author of Healing with Whole Foods. It was very interesting, if not daunting. His book is a huge one, full of information about Chinese medicine and using diet to heal diseases.
The big news was that parasites are a huge part of most people’s health problems. It seems that most of us are harboring an imbalance in our intestinal flora such as candida overgrowth, or some of us have picked up microbes at some point in our lives that have been sitting in us all this time and creating problems of various sorts such as allergies, skin problems, obesity, and so on. Some folks who have been in the far East get parasites there which can still be around, and some of us are getting exposed to inappropriate microorganisms by our household pets. That was especially hard for me to hear.
At the course we got new information about how to treat these situations with herbs and diet. And we are ready to help everyone that we think is ready for this.
The dietary changes are often fairly simple, to my way of thinking, but I am sure many of my clients would find them a bit daunting. Therefore, I’ll be posting ideas and recipes on this blog ongoingly. Most of what needs to be changed is increasing the variety and amount of fresh vegetables in the diet. And incorporating the use of SPROUTS. So we will be talking about sprouting. Additionally, the use of micro-algae such as chlorella, spirulina, and blue-green will be suggested. However, the choice of which alga to use depends a lot on the condition and constitution of the person.
Paul was pretty firm in his ideas, having treated people nutritionally for 30 years or so. He believes that a raw foods diet is great in the short run, but that it ends up making people very weak over time. It is also full of nuts and their butters, which are very fatty.
He also thinks that the vegan diet is not a good one for people unless they are meditators or very quiet and still a lot. He thinks that most people need some animal protein if they are going to be out in the modern world. But, of course, he recommends limited amounts and types of animal protein. You guessed it, free range, organic, grass fed is best. And properly combined small amounts. That means 2-3 oz combines with vegetables at a meal. Never combined with starch at a meal, due to the differences in digestive enzymes required for meat and starch.
Paul bases most of his recommendations on anthropological studies of primitive people, combined with the principles of Asian medicine. He says that the evidence is that for 60 million years man was hunter gatherer. That means mostly veges, berries, and meat. Also small amounts of grains later in history.
He also recommends the under-eating approach that has gotten some press in the past couple of years. That means eating less than you’d like. It has shown to lead to longer life and less disease in many cases.
And of course, no sugar or sweeteners of any kind for most of us. No refined foods at all. Nothing prepared or packaged, except frozen veges. So that means we have to COOK.
I’ll be posting suggestions about how to cook ahead for the week so we are not in trouble by not having things ready. I’ll also point out ways that we can use things like pressure cookers and slow cookers to make life easier.
There are many cookbooks out there that feature this type of cooking. Most of the healthy recipe books, even those from places like weight watchers, are focusing on exactly this type of recipe nowadays.
So, stay tuned and I’ll be letting you all know more about these ideas very soon.
More Later.
Detox and Purify!
We are now offering our spring detox at Acupuncture of Iowa. This year we are using the Purification Program from the fine company, Standard Process of Elmira, Wisconsin. This company focuses on the benefits of real, whole food to empower the body to do what it does best, in every area of function.
I started my detox this weekend to prepare for offering it to clients, and decided to post my first few recipes for the food I am eating. These are all simple and really yummy. If you are not used to the taste of real food, they will introduce you gently.
East Indian Gentle Lentils–good stuff
1 c lentils, 2 c water or broth, 1/2 tsp whole cumin seeds, 3 cloves garlic, minced, 1 tsp oil (olive preferred), salt to taste
In a heavy small pot, heat the oil, add the cumin seeds and stir 30 seconds till aromatic, add the minced garlic and stir 30 seconds till aromatic. Add the lentils and water, bring to a boil, add salt, and lower the heat to very low. Place a lid on the pot and simmer for 1 hour and 15 minutes. Check a couple of times to stir and make sure it is not burning.
Savory Shredded Sprouts–Really Yummy!
1-2 lb brussels sprouts, bottoms trimmed and tops run through the slicing blade on a food processor (or sliced by hand) till in fine shreds, 1 T butter, 1 T olive oil, salt and pepper to taste
Heat the oil in a heavy bottomed skillet or wok. Melt the butter into the oil and wait for it to stop foaming. Throw in the shredded sprouts and stir around every couple of minutes. Cook until all the shreds are softened and bright green or yellowish. I like to get them a little browned in areas. If you want, you can add more oil or butter so all the shreds are coated. You can also throw in toasted pecan bits if you are allowed them. This is a great recipe for Thanksgiving or any other nice dinner. Also great just to have around.
Green Beans, East Indian Style–simple, healthy and good eating
1 lb green beans, washed, ends trimmed, and cut into 1 inch sections; 2 tsp olive oil; 1 tsp black mustard seeds; 4 cloves garlic, minced; pinch red pepper flakes; salt and pepper to taste
Blanch green beans for 3-4 minutes and throw into ice cold water to stop the cooking. Drain beans in a colander. Heat the oil in a skillet or wok. Toss in the mustard seeds and heat till they begin to pop. Throw in the garlic and stir and cook for 30 seconds till aromatic. Then put in the red pepper flakes and stir for a few seconds. Put all the beans into the hot oil and spices, salt them, and stir and cook the whole bunch for about 8 minutes over medium heat or till done to your liking.
I hope these three recipes will be helpful during your detox. I’ll be posting more as the next few days and weeks go by.
Announcing our New Acupuncturist, Laura McCoy
I am thrilled to announce the arrival of our new associate, Laura McCoy.
Laura is an Iowa City native, having lived in the Seattle area for the last 30 years. She did her undergraduate education in Exercise Physiology, became a Certified Athletic Trainer and worked with pro athletes for many years. In the early 200os she entered acupuncture school in the Seattle area and got her Master’s in Acupuncture. She then worked in one of the most successful acupuncture clinics in the country, where she honed her skills in diagnosis and mastered a powerful method of acupuncture, The Balance Method. After moving on from that clinic, she gained more experience in the complementary medicine field by working in a nutrition clinic. There she gained education about the precise evaluation of patients for their nutritional needs and mastered the use of whole-food-based supplements to support patients’ bodies in healing themselves. This method is based on research and fits with our clinic goal of helping our patients by using dietary therapies in accord with the principles of Oriental medicine.
Laura M has returned from Seattle to Iowa City to be closer to family, and we were very lucky to have her come along. She was aware of Laura C’s reputation and thus sought out our clinic. Laura M is a go-getter and has lots of great ideas about how to promote acupuncture in our area and thus help more people.
Laura M is excited to bring her wide-ranging skills to us. Her enthusiasm and knowledge are impressive. She is committed to enabling patients to heal themselves using whole foods and healthy body therapies. She and Laura C are working many hours at present to integrate her materials and methods into the clinic.
Laura McCoy will be joyfully providing the following services at Acupuncture of Iowa:
—Oriental Medicine assessments through history, tongue, and pulse diagnosis
—Acupuncture, using the Balance Method and Japanese Style in a blended manner
—Nutritional Consultation and Programs in harmony with the principles of Oriental medicine
—Individualized programs for rehabilitation of injuries
—Individualized exercise programs for wellness, strength, and healing
—Individualized treatment of acute and chronic problems with the tools of the athletic trainer
Acupuncture and Weight Loss
You have probably heard about acupuncture for weight loss. And everybody is looking for weight loss.
In the past we tried using the standard ear acupuncture protocol for weight loss, but found that it did not produce the results our clients had hoped for. This was very disappointing, because we really want to help people.
Recently I was reminded about the fact that we can do so much more for people to help with weight loss.
In Oriental Medicine terms, people are overweight because of an imbalance in their system. It could be what we call Spleen Qi deficiency, Excess damp accumulation, or many other possibilities. In our medicine, the focus of a good weight loss program is to rebalance that which is out of balance. That means to support the Qi of the Spleen to improve digestion, reduce sugar cravings, and utilize the energy of food better. Or to rid the body of the excessive dampness that is sitting there in the form of swelling. These are just two examples.
Oriental therapies help optimize all aspects of physiology. This means that people who ‘just can’t lose weight’ actually can be helped. Whatever physiological processes are out of balance can be optimized, resulting in overall health improvement and the natural loss of weight. You could say that their metabolism is improved.
So, the idea is that with our combination of acupuncture treatments and herbal supplementation, as well as sensible dietary advice and moderate lifestyle changes, we can bring the body into a much healthier state, resulting in weight loss. This means no drastic calorie restriction; perhaps no calorie counting at all. It also means personalized treatment plans for each person; no one-size-fits all treatment. It also means that in addition to weight loss, a person would probably find many other things improving at the same time. We call those ‘side benefits’.
So, Oriental medicine, including acupuncture, herbal treatment, sensible eating and activity can result in a healthy body naturally.
We are happy to welcome patients for this type of care.
Spring Detox Time Again
We are all feeling a bit toxic these days. From not exercising as much as usual, from eating the heavier, starchier winter foods, and from breathing that old indoor air for so many months. We feel the beginnings of spring and crave that great feeling of energy. This makes us think of the idea of cleaning up/out our bodies to prepare for warm weather. We might want to lose a little weight, get more energy, or get rid of that old brain fog from the winter. Lots of people come to the clinic asking what I recommend for a spring ‘cleanse’.
Most people don’t know this, but acupuncture treatment helps the body detoxify.
My teacher Miki Shima OMD, used to say that acupuncture is an inherently detoxifying process. By that he meant that it switches on the Liver to more efficiently clear toxins from the body.
For many years we have seen the occasional patient who feels tired or achy the day after the treatment. This is a sign that their body is going through a detoxification process, and the toxins are only halfway out of the system. Once the toxins are gone, they feel a lot better.
Nowadays, know how to avoid having this happen with our clients. And we have some really good strategies to do that.
Consider using acupuncture to help your spring detoxification regimen. Or adding it to a cleanse that you are already doing.