Wrist Acupuncture Prevents…

Wrist Acupuncture Or Acupressure Prevents Nausea From Anesthesia

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Acupuncture For PMS Relief

Women Turn To Acupuncture For PMS Relief

by Reporting Mallika Marshall, MD

Millions of women suffer from severe PMS symptoms, and more and more of them are turning to the ancient technique of acupuncture, looking for relief.  Patty Gift remembers the severe pain of pre-menstrual syndrome, before she tried acupuncture. “I was not functional. So, I was irritable. I was very fuzzy in my thinking.”

She tried everything from dietary changes to over the counter medications. Even the things that typically work, didn’t work for Patty.  “I was exercising, which I had read would really help. At one point I was working with a gynecologist and taking birth control pills.”  Patty was beginning to lose hope until someone suggested the ancient Chinese treatment acupuncture.

Acupuncturist Dr. Frank Lipman says the number of women seeing him for PMS is increasing. While there are no major clinical studies on PMS and acupuncture, Dr. Lipman knows what he sees in his patients. “At least 75 percent of women get better with acupuncture for PMS,” Dr. Lipman said.

A practitioner will insert thin needles into specific parts of the body. Dr. Lipman says this releases blocked energy, easing symptoms like bloating and sweating. “They feel like this load has been released or this pressure that they were holding in has been released,” Lipman said.  Patty felt better after just one session. “I feel much more clear-headed. My mood is much better.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has no stance on the treatment, but some members believe it can work.  “Acupuncture probably affects the hormones of the brain called endorphins, which make people feel better,” explained Dr. Veronic Ravnikar.  Dr. Ravnikar says she would never deter a patient from trying it, but stresses it’s important for women to see a doctor prior to any type of alternative treatment.  “Along with the treatments, I always suggest lifestyle changes: exercise, good nutrition, and multi-vitamins.”

Acupuncture for pre-menstrual syndrome typically lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour per session. Most experts recommend regular treatments in order to maintain the best results.

Military Acupuncture

Military tries ‘battlefield’ acupuncture to ease pain

By David Wood

Stephen M. Burns, a specialist in acupuncture, inserts a needle into the ear of Lt. Col. Catherine A. Reardon to treat her headaches and hand pain. (Baltimore Sun photo by Glenn Fawcett / December 9, 2008)

“We use acupuncture as an adjunct” to traditional therapy, said Niemtzow. “The Chinese have used it for 5,000 years. It works, and it’s powerful.”

The procedure developed by Niemtzow is a variation of Traditional Chinese medicine acupuncture in which long, hair-thin needles are inserted into the body at any of hundreds of points to ease pain.

Niemtzow’s variation uses one or more needles inserted into any of five points on the ear. The needles, which penetrate about a millimeter (or 4/100ths of an inch) into the skin, fall out after several days. The procedure can be repeated.

The ear acts as a “monitor” of signals passing from body sensors to the brain, he said. Those signals can be intercepted and manipulated to stop pain or for other purposes.

Even 18th-century pirates were convinced of the value, piercing their lobes with earrings “to improve their night vision,” Niemtzow said with a grin.

He calls his procedure battlefield acupuncture because it’s easily learned and requires no cumbersome equipment. A pack of needles can easily be carried in a pocket.

The method can be taught in a few hours to doctors, medics and combat troops, most of whom already have learned traditional battlefield first aid.

Col. Anyce Tock, chief of medical services for the Air Force Surgeon General, said yesterday that the service has authorized 32 active-duty physicians to begin “battlefield acupuncture”‘ training.

Battlefield Acupuncture

Air Force to Use ‘Battlefield Acupuncture’ for Pain Relief

By Noah Shachtman

The military medical community has been using all sorts of alternative therapies — yoga, meditation, even animal-petting — to ease the strains of post-traumatic stress disorder FOR returning troops. One of the non-traditional treatments will be used in a war zone for the first time.

“The Air Force will begin teaching ‘battlefield acupuncture’ early next year to physicians deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan,” reports the Baltimore Sun’s David Wood. “The initiative marks the first high-level endorsement of acupuncture by the traditionally conservative military medical community, officials said.”

Using tiny needles that barely penetrate the skin of a patient’s ear, Air Force doctors here say they can interrupt pain signals going to the brain … relieving even unbearable pain for days at a time….

“This is one of the fastest pain attenuators in existence — the pain can be gone in five minutes,” said Col. Richard Niemtzow, a physician, acupuncturist and senior adviser to the Air Force surgeon general.

Niemtzow, an oncologist, also sees acupuncture as a way to treat obesity and macular degeneration.

Meanwhile, other Eastern-inspired techniques are slowly spreading throughout the services. Walter Reed hospital is using yoga to combat PTSD. Submariners and Camp Lejeune marines are using “Warrior Mind Training” to improve mental focus. And the Army is spending $4 million to study various alternative-therapies, including a research project that examines “how holding and petting an animal can treat PTSD.”

Wade turning to acupuncture

Bothered by knee tendinitis, the Miami Heat guard is utilizing acupuncture therapy to help relieve the pain. Wade missed 23 games with a dislocated left shoulder before returning last week, but as the postseason looms, it’s the knee – not the shoulder – that’s causing him the most angst.

“You just try to find a way to feel a little better,” Wade said Monday before the Heat hosted the Boston Celtics. “Find a way. We get the best of help from all the best doctors around the world, so you try to find someone to help you. Right now I’m doing that and I feel a little better.”

Wade, the reigning NBA finals MVP who entered Monday averaging 27.8 points, fourth in the league, has taken a number of painkilling injections during the previous two postseasons for a variety of ailments, including rib and leg injuries.

Acupuncture is a centuries-old practice of poking tiny needles into the skin to treat a variety of ailments, including seizures, skin conditions, arthritis, chronic pain and sinus infections. A number of NBA players have tried it in recent years, including New Jersey guard Jason Kidd, Los Angeles Lakers forward Vladimir Radmanovic and even Wade’s teammate Shaquille O’Neal – who said he utilized it during the 2001 playoffs, when he was with the Lakers.

And this isn’t Wade’s first foray with the treatment, either. He used it on his shoulder during his college years, when he was on a summertime European tour with a team coached by Bill Van Gundy.

“You can’t do it every day,” Wade said. “But I do it like every other day. It helps.”

Since Wade returned to the Heat lineup on April 8, he hasn’t complained of any issues with the shoulder.

But the knee has been tender; he grimaced last week after jumping for a dunk, has been undergoing other forms of treatment besides acupuncture and had a large ice pack strapped to the joint after Miami practiced Monday morning.

“It’s getting better,” Wade said. “That’s the only thing I can ask for, that each day it doesn’t get any worse. As long as it doesn’t get any worse, I’m not going to complain.”

Miami 4-17-07 (AP)

Vet Treats Pets

Vet Treats Pets with Acupuncture…

Sugarfoot was clearly a little agitated by the attention of a mysterious human. Already in pain from a sore back and tightly corralled in a holding pen, this 14-year-old pleasure horse with a braided mane wasn’t in the mood for any funny business.

The horse would have been reassured to know that the woman working around him had his best interests at heart and that her ministrations would soon start to feel good.

Dr. Shana Buchanan, a Navasota veterinarian, is performing acupuncture to alleviate Sugarfoot’s sore back. She also uses her treatments to ease the suffering of small animals such as dogs and cats.

After the needles are deftly inserted at points along the horse’s back and legs, along with an injection of vitamin B12 and a pain reliever at the sorest spots, Sugarfoot’s head droops and his ears turn back in contentment.

Sugarfoot’s owner, Montgomery resident Catherine Price, first noticed something wrong with him during a ride. Thinking it was a hoof problem, she took him to a farrier, an expert in shoeing horses.

“When the farrier lifted his hind leg, it was obvious there was something else wrong,” Price said. “Sugarfoot couldn’t keep his back feet up, and nearly fell because it hurt his back so much.”

Price took Sugarfoot to a veterinary chiropractor who couldn’t cure his problem and instead suggested she try acupuncture.

As of Easter Sunday, Sugarfoot’s fourth weekly treatment session, the horse was continuing to show improvement, as he had after each visit to Buchanan’s clinic, Price said. The normally feisty horse is so mellow after a treatment that she believes he sleeps in the trailer on the way home.

Buchanan is also pleased with his response to treatments. “When I first saw Sugarfoot, this area of his back was so tender and tight I couldn’t even get the needles in,” the vet said while removing acupuncture needles from the horse’s rump.

The procedure reduces the amount of medications needed for her patients, blending Eastern and Western medical practices, Buchanan said.

For instance, dachshunds are prone to herniated discs as they age and require a large amount of pain medication if they do. With acupuncture, Buchanan can reduce the amount of medication these dogs need so that they are not asleep all the time. Acupuncture also can be used in special cases where medicine alone cannot correct the problem.

Buchanan used a special kind of acupuncture on another equine patient with a dire problem. Half of the horse’s face had caved in from muscular atrophy so the animal couldn’t eat correctly.

The vet inserted acupuncture needles into the collapsed muscle on the horse’s jaw and then applied a slight electric current to the needles. After multiple treatments, the muscles in the horse’s face were stimulated and rebuilt until one side of the horse’s face looked just as good as the other side.

“Everything we know in Western science is explained differently in Eastern medicine,” Buchanan said.

According to Eastern medicine, energy flows through certain channels in the body, and there are points along the channel that can influence the flow of energy, she said. Throughout the years it’s been passed down that acupuncture at these points helps energy flow unimpeded throughout the body.

“If you look at it microscopically, the major points that we know of are either nerve bundles or major artery and vein junctions,” she said. “The points correspond with anatomy, and you can treat locally or systemwide. With Sugarfoot, I locally addressed a collection of charley horses and muscle knots. If you have stagnant energy flow, then you have knots, and the key is to help keep that energy circulating.”

Acupuncture also has given Angel, a 22-year-old cat suffering from arthritis, a new lease on life. Angel, a Siamese cross, was a brownish color in her youth but has become almost completely white as she aged.

Starting with regular acupuncture treatments from Buchanan, Angel slowly began to recover from a lethargic, almost bedridden status. Angel has since become more mobile and her pain has diminished.

After seeing that the recent cold weather hadn’t made Angel’s arthritis worse, Buchanan decided to reduce her treatments to every five weeks instead of monthly. In Eastern medical thought, dampness causes energy to settle and the cold stifles the flow of energy causing pain, Buchanan said.

According to Angel’s owner, Kathy Bowen of College Station, “Acupuncture has been tremendously successful with my Angel. It’s priceless. With pets living longer, they face many health challenges we haven’t heard of before. After Dr. Buchanan visited my pet, it’s like years have been taken off.”

Acupuncture is used on many animals, everything from lions and elephants to birds and “pocket pets” like ferrets, but it is used most frequently on dogs and cats, said Dr. Ed Boldt, executive director of the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society.

The society has been training veterinarians, including Buchanan, in acupuncture since 1975, and there are 800 to 900 veterinarians worldwide trained to perform animal acupuncture. Buchanan recalled that one of the lecturers during her certification by the acupuncture society had even used it to treat a dolphin.

In most states, veterinarians are not required to receive specific training before performing acupuncture, but most do, and animal owners are encouraged to seek out trained veterinarians if their pet may need the procedure, Boldt said. The American Veterinary Medical Association does not recognize acupuncture as a board-certified procedure because it awaits more research into the procedure.

Research is under way at multiple universities, Boldt said. “Becoming a boarded specialty is a long, arduous task, but we’ve been working with the AVMA,” he said.

Navasota, Texas (AP) By Hunter Sauls, Bryan-College Station Eagle 4-22-07

Acupuncture for ‘Miracle’ Baby

A Central Florida couple credits the treatment of fertility through acupuncture for the birth of their baby after all other treatments and options were exhausted, according to Local 6 News 11-10-04.

Local 6 News featured Gina Hawthorne and her husband, who have tried to have a baby for about 8 years.

The couple tried traditional fertility treatments and even adoption, but were unsuccessful.

Hawthorne then stumbled on fertility through acupuncture and decided to try it. She first went to acupuncture physician Heidi Regier.

“This is a relatively new trend, probably in the last seven years, more predominantly in the last three years,” Regier said. “I have been treating people that are not getting any other treatment and indeed they’re surprised.”

Local 6 News aired video of Hawthorne going through a typical treatment for fertility to bring the body back into balance and make it optimal to conceive.

“So what it does is restore the function and therefore, ovulation happens at the right time,” Regier said.

“I think that something that really impressed me when I came to Heidi and she told me about everything that was going on in my body, Hawthorne said. “She had touched some parts of my abdomen that was always tender.”

Hawthorne had two acupuncture sessions, complemented by one invitro-fertilization treatment — and one month later there was news, according to the report.

“I got the phone call and she (Regier) said ‘Heidi, guess what? I won’t need to come for that other appointment, we’re pregnant.’” Hawthorne said. “We couldn’t believe it after so many years of trying and it finally had worked.”

Local 6 News reported that Aidan Hawthorne was born healthy.

“We felt like it was a miracle,” Hawthorne said.

Acupuncturists believe they can now treat men for infertility.

Acupuncturist Helen Tai has treated men for infertility where the needles may go in the head, the stomach and the legs.

Studies show that acupuncture can increase a man’s sperm count and the motility of the sperm.

One study followed 28 infertile men and in every one sperm count and motility improved with acupuncture. It is also believed acupuncture helps reduce stress and increase the blood flow to the reproductive organs, according to the report.

Acupuncture Helps Children Handle Pain

SUNDAY, June 29, 2003 by Kathleen Doheny (HealthDayNews) — The boy was just 8, but he suffered from Crohn’s disease, a painful intestinal inflammation. He was on medication, but struggled with frequent headaches, one of the potential side effects of the treatments.

So Dr. Lixing Lao, a licensed acupuncturist and director of the traditional Chinese medicine research program at the University of Maryland’s Center for Integrative Medicine, suggested acupuncture to the boy and his parents.

They agreed to try it and after a series of weekly treatments, the child noted a dramatic drop in pain. “In the beginning, it was done once a week for several months,” Lao remembers. “When the condition was controlled, it was less frequent.” Eventually, the boy didn’t need acupuncture to control the pain.

Lao is one of a growing number of acupuncturists and other health-care providers who offer the ancient Chinese therapy to children. Increasingly, pediatricians are embracing the idea — acupuncture is now an option at about one third of the 43 pediatric pain clinics nationwide, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“It’s becoming more accepted in the U.S.,” says Lao, who learned the therapy as part of his medical training in China.

The American Academy of Pediatrics thus far has no official policy on acupuncture use on children.

But in 1997, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued a general consensus statement that acupuncture can help relieve certain conditions, such as nausea and vomiting that accompany chemotherapy and post-operative dental pain. The NIH statement also said acupuncture may be effective as an adjunct therapy or alternative therapy for other conditions, such as asthma, headache, low back pain, menstrual cramps and other problems.

Lao says acupuncture shows promise for a number of childhood health problems, including asthma, diarrhea, loss of appetite, eating disorders — even attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Acupuncture — inserting fine needles into the skin — relies on the premise that the body has up to 2,000 “points” that are connected by meridians (lines) of energy known as Qi (“chi”). When Qi flows well, the body stays healthy. Acupuncture restores the balance of the energy flow, or Qi.

While Lao says it’s best to use acupuncture on a child no younger than 5 or 6, other experts start earlier.

Dr. Lonnie Zeltzer, director of the pediatric pain program at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says she has used acupuncture on infants.

Combining acupuncture with other complementary medicine techniques works well, too, Zeltzer says. In a recent study, she and her colleagues evaluated the use of acupuncture and hypnosis together to treat chronic pain.

They evaluated 31 children, aged 6 to 18, who had a variety of health problems, such as gastric pain so severe they were doubled over or migraine headaches that a pediatric neurologist could not treat successfully.

After the needles were in place, a psychology intern performed hypnosis during the 20-minute acupuncture sessions. Then another researcher helped the child imagine a “favorite place,” Zeltzer says.

“The overall improvement was pretty impressive,” Zeltzer says. Both parents and the children reported significant improvements in pain after the sessions, according to the study, which appeared in the October 2002 issue of the Journal of Pain Symptom Management.

“I actually think any pain condition is amenable to acupuncture,” Zeltzer says, “especially those that aren’t easily fixed [by other treatments].”

The experts’ advice to parents: “If their children have a common disorder and they are concerned about side effects of medication, they should consider acupuncture,” Lao says. “They can also combine acupuncture with conventional medicine.”

Requirements for practicing acupuncture vary state by state. To be sure an acupuncture practitioner — whether he or she is an acupuncturist or a physician — is qualified, experts suggest getting a referral from your child’s pediatrician or inquiring at a pediatric pain clinic.

ABC World News… Acupuncture and High Blood Pressure

More Americans will develop dangerous high blood pressure. But now, the Government says a simple Chinese technique may cure it without side effects and without drugs.

POSITIVE FEEDBACK: ON ABC news  they stated that after 12 acupuncture treatments over a 6 week period, on can be cured from high blood pressure. They stated that cured meant normal blood pressure for a year. 2-26-02

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