Acupuncture Without Needles
There are, in the United States, over 7 million people who are partially or completely disabled by back pain and another 40-50 million people who suffer from chronic recurrent headaches. Frustrated with my inability to help all my patients with conventional treatments, I have been using acupuncture since 1981. But about ten years ago I started using more acupressure, particularly since I could teach a lot of people to continue treating themselves.
Last month we saw evidence from a study using magnetoencephelography (MEG) scanning equipment that acupuncture reduces the activity of regions of the limbic system of the brain. MEG is a relatively new technology that measures the very faint magnetic fields that emanate from the head because of brain activity, instead of measuring electrical activity itself, which is a fairly blunt instrument. This reduced activity only occurred with deep needling, and when the patient experienced what is known as de qi. In Chinese medicine it is normally considered that the needle has not been correctly positioned until the patient and the practitioner both get the sensation of de qi. By contrast, superficial needling just caused activation of sensory areas of the cortex. Many doctors trained in needling techniques ignore the de qi experience, which is, I think, a mistake. When you are able to elicit it, the efficacy of acupuncture increases enormously.
Keep in mind what I have said before: just because acupuncture is associated with neurological changes, does not mean that they are responsible for the effects of acupuncture.
In this week’s British Medical Journal is an article from Taiwan, showing the effectiveness of acupressure in 129 patients with chronic low back pain. Like every study ever done, it is possible to pick some holes in this one, but overall it appears to be sound.
Now I am interested to see a press release about a form of needle-less therapy. I have written before about Thought Field Therapy (TFT), and the subject of the press release is a development of it called Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT. While TFT uses tapping at specific points, together with humming, counting and eye movements, EFT is much simpler. It combines gentle fingertip tapping on key acupuncture points with focused thought. It is claimed to effectively reduce – and often permanently eliminating – chronic pain. According to its practitioners, EFT is more than 80-percent effective in treating headaches, back pain, cancer pain, arthritis, and pain from other conditions.
There is the rub: I could find no published research when I did a Medline search. That being said, I have reported elsewhere that I went to California to debunk TFT and became a convert after being treated by its inventor, Roger Callahan. There is a small amount of research on TFT that appears to confirm its effectiveness in some conditions, and I have certainly found it to be very helpful for many people.
Whether the claims of EFT will be born out remains to be seen. I have seen the techniques work, and I have to give credit where it is due. In exchange for your email address Gary Craig, who developed EFT, allows you to download a EFT manual from his website. You may also purchase DVDs from his site to learn more about this treatment modality. As always, I do not suggest using EFT or any other method in place of tried and tested treatments, but it may be a good adjunctive treatment for mild conditions.
In future message and in my newsletter I shall share some of the precise techniques that I have found useful, as well as ones that did not work out for me.
Technorati tags: Emotional Freedom Technique, headaches, acupuncture, acupressure, chronic pain
Attention Deficit, Money and Motivation
People often say that I’m someone who’s glass is always half full. Well, that’s not quite correct: I’m a huge realist, but I don’t like the idea of pathologizing everything that happens to us. One example of this is ADD.
Though untreated clinical ADD can lead to a great deal of distress and the ever-present risk of impulsive behaviors and substance abuse, I am also eager to examine the positive aspects of having attentional problems. Many of the young people and adults with ADD are also extremely successful in settings that don’t require the academic type of concentration. I have met entrepreneurs with ADD, as well as some highly creative people and athletes. A question has been whether ADD might confer some others gifts, benefits or advantages on people.
Although a year old, we recently came across an item that is not as well-known as it should be. Studies using fMRI have indicated that some of the regions of the brain that do not normally show much activity in young people with ADD become highly activated by monetary rewards.
This is not to say that giving young people money is the way to “conquer” ADD. Instead it suggest that rather than just thinking about people with ADD as just having an attention problem, we should also think of them as people who derive pleasure from different things than the bulk of the populations. Not having to spend all their time attending to linear learning may actually lead to greater freedom of imagination, creativity and emotional expression.
People with sever attentional problems can run into a lot of problems in relationships, even losing attention during sex. But it may be that may also be that minor degrees of loss of attentional focus may also enhance some people’s ability to feel empathy.
Technorati Tags: ADHD, ADD, reward, Motivation, Creativity
Healing and Spirituality
For thousands of years, spiritual teachers and healers were one and the same. The first hospitals in Europe were founded by religious orders. There was always a rather interesting split: folk healers were primarily, though not exclusively female, while the hospitals were male dominated. One of the fruits of the Enlightenment was the separation of healing from faith. The separation of body and spirit was pursued vigorously by medical science as it advanced. Indeed, many in the medical establishment echoed Freud in comparing religion to a neurosis. A well-known figure in British medicine has made no bones about his opposition to the involvement of spirituality in medicine, which he says is the proper business of the church, and has nothing to do with science.
Over the last two decades, things have been changing. A number of physicians and scientists have recognized the importance of re-introducing a spiritual perspective into medicine. But do they have any right to do so? The answer is a definite “Yes”! There has been a gradual build up of scientific evidence that prayer and faith can protect health. A second area of investigation is whether religious or spiritual practice, in particularly intercessory prayer, can affect the health of those being prayed for?
First is the clear observation that faith and prayer can support physical and emotional well-being as well as the health of relationships. One school of thought is that this is all the consequence of an internal healing mechanism. Over 30 years ago Herbert Benson at Harvard first described the “Relaxation response,” a simple method of using techniques derived from Transcendental Meditation for changing a person’s emotional response to stress. He then demonstrated that prayer could also elicit a relaxation response.
In recent years, there has been a global effort to research the connections between faith and health, and I have been particularly impressed by the body of work being generated by the Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health at Duke University, that has provided incontrovertible evidence that religious people live longer, healthier lives. This seems to be more than just the stress-reducing impact of prayer and meditation.
We also have evidence that thankfulness and an attitude of gratitude may have a lasting impact on your mood and state of health and well-being.
Second is intercessory prayer. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the psychiatrist Daniel Benor. Like most people trained in Western medicine, he was very skeptical about spiritual healing until he saw a tough case that failed to respond to conventional medicine but was cured by a spiritual healer. He then started to study spiritual healing and has written the standard textbook on the subject, which runs to FOUR volumes. He once told me that the evidence for spiritual healing is stronger than the evidence for almost any other field of unorthodox medicine and stronger than the evidence for quite a number of practices in orthodox medicine!
The moral of the story? Do not neglect your own spirituality or the spirituality of those around you, and remember that empirical scientific research is showing us yet again, that the power of worship and prayer are far from being neuroses or primitive superstitions.
Technorati tags: spirituality, healing, thankfulness, prayer, Herbert Benson, Daniel Benor
Stressful Marriages Can be Damaging to Your Health
There is an extremely interesting article in the month’s Archives of General Psychiatry, which was picked up by the media that examined how marital stress effects healing.
Most people now accept that the mind has powerful effects on the body, though as recently as the 1970s this was still regarded as rank heresy by many in the medical community. This new study is important for our understanding of the relationship between stress and physical health, and gives us further insights into how we can help ourselves stay well.
The study was done at Ohio State University and examines 42 married couples. Each person was given small skin lesions, and the startling finding was that in hostile couples, the wounds healed 60% more slowly than they did in non-hostile couples. The investigators even identified an inflammatory mediator called interleukin-6 (IL-6), as the biochemical link between hostility and slow wound healing. IL-6 levels are linked to long-term inflammation, which is in turn implicated in a number of illnesses, including diabetes mellitus, arthritis and cardiovascular disease.
A thirty-minute disagreement with a spouse could push back wound healing for 24 hours. The skin is the largest organ in the body and is exquisitely sensitive to stress: just thing of blushing and getting zits when under stress. So it is difficult to extrapolate from these findings in the skin, to try and predict what would happen with healing of internal organs. But we do have enough information already to say the following:
1. Allowing yourself to become involved in an argument may have long-term physical effects on you.
2. Some years ago I worked with a group of fine people who did just one thing that I did not like: they were wedded to the idea that it is a really good idea to vent your feelings. They would go as far as allowing patients to hit walls and other inanimate objects. I was never keen on this, feeling that expressing a lot of negative emotion could be counter-productive. After a patient broke bones in his hand after striking the wall, I quietly put an end to the practice. This new research indicates that I was correct to do so.
3. If you are going to have surgery, it is a good idea to be in a calm and peaceful frame of mind.
4. Stress is often unpredictable so it is a really good idea to be engaged in some ongoing stress management practice, so that you are better able to deal with the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," as Shakespeare put it over four hundred years ago. Clearly this doesn’t mean that you have to walk around like a burned out hippy on Quaaludes. Unless you really want to…. The best techniques that I know of for dealing with stress are the Sixty Second Peace Technique, Qigong and Yoga Breathing. If you have your own method, then stick with it. Otherwise you may want to check out some of the materials that I have written and recorded.
Homeopathy R.I.P.?
Homeopathic medicine has now been in use for over two centuries since its basic ideas were rehabilitated by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. And its essential concepts have always seemed strange to anyone with any scientific training. The central idea is that people have a life force that, if disturbed, can lead to illness. The second idea is the "doctrine of similars, " or of "like curing like." If you peel an onion, then your eyes and nose may start to run. So one treatment for a person with runny eyes and nose might be onion. The third peculiarity of homeopathy is the use of super-dilute remedies that are prepared in a very precise way. There is a nice summary article of some of the basic ideas.
There is an important principle in scientific research which sometimes gets forgotten: there are many different types of study and one of the most fundamental of errors is to mix up pragmatic (does it work?) and mechanistic (how does it work?) experiments. Pragmatic studies usually follow on from clinical observations, and even if something is shown to work, it can take years to work out the mechanisms. Aspirin would be a good example: it was used in various forms for over a century before it was discovered how it worked.
In August of this year the Lancet published an article on homeopathy that has been taken to signal the end of homeopathy. In fact in an accompanying editorial, there was a call for homeopathy to be abandoned, altogether. However, in the three months since then, a number of us have been through the Lancet study very carefully, and have found some snags in it. So far the Lancet has chosen not to publish responses to the article, and the authors themselves have, as of now, refused to disclose exactly which studies they analyzed. This is highly unusual, and should give pause to gleeful skeptics who have taken this one study to be the death knell of this form of treatment. Worse yet, the folk who have dismissed homeopathy based upon media reports of the study, without examining the original.
As examples of some of the astonishing problems identified in the Lancet publication: there was no clear statement of aim. This is normally required before you even begin a piece of research. The investigators first look at every homeopathic study that they could find and then decided which studies to include. This is again a very unusual way of doing things. And then there are a lot of questions about the statistical analysis. We all know that you can use statistics to prove almost anything that you want to, and the debate about the appropriateness of the methods used is going to go on for a very long time.
The next time that somebody tells you that homeopathy is now a dead duck, tell them that the study is still being discussed. And as I have said on previous occasions, we do not make progress on the basis of one single paper. Even Watson and Crick’s model of the structure of DNA had to be confirmed before it was accepted, and going back further, some of the brilliant insights of Albert Einstein were not confirmed for almost fourteen years. But this study has already led to the Swiss Government deciding to reduce reimbursement for homeopathic treatment.
I have also seen some violent criticism of a six-year study involving around 6,500 patients who attended the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital in England. This was a simple naturalistic study that asked a simple question: of all the people who visited the hospital, how many felt better afterwards? This is the kind of audit that is being done all the time to see how people have got on with a hospital or a treatment. It does not "prove" or "disprove" homeopathy, it just asks people how they feel. And most said that they had benefited. To criticize it for not being randomized or placebo controlled is a bit like going to an Italian restaurant and complaining that they don’t serve Chinese food!
Homeopathy is no "cure all," but I will not abandon it unless we get some far more impressive data than that from the Lancet paper, for not only have I seen it work in patients and in animals with monotonous regularity, but because behind the scenes, we have been seeing more and more research coming not from patient studies, but from physics and cell biology laboratories, that seems to be giving the specialty a firm theoretical footing.
I shall continue to report both the positive and the negative studies as they are published, and offering guidance about how we can use different forms of treatment in combination.
Technorati tags: homeopathy
Energy Medicine
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V)
–William Shakespeare (English Poet and Dramatist, 1564-1616)
There has been a lot of talk recently about energy medicine, energy psychology and even energy psychiatry.
What exactly are they, and why do we believe that these therapies only have half the answer?
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine divides energy medicine into veritable and putative. I find these terms a little clumsy. By veritable they mean energies like light, sound and electromagnetism that can be measured. They use the term putative energy fields, also known as biofields, because they have not been measured in a reproducible manner. Treatments like Reiki, Qigong, Shiatsu, Healing touch, Thought Field Therapy and perhaps prayer can all be included under the heading of energy medicines.
A note of caution here. The Scientific and Medical Network, which I had the privilege of serving for a number of years, has had a high-powered study group looking into energy medicine. At its inaugural meeting, the Nobel Prize-winning Physicist Brian Josephson made the important point that we need to be careful about our definitions. Let me clarify that, and tell you why this is such an important issue.
In my book Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I reported the stunning discovery that scientists seem to have "overlooked" more than 90 percent of the universe. This missing piece is being referred to as "dark" matter and "dark" energy. We know very little about it, but some visionary scientists are already wondering if this dark matter and dark energy may have something to do with the burgeoning evidence for the existence of "subtle" systems associated with the body. These subtle systems appear to be of many types, and in Asia have been given names like Qi (Chi) and Prana, or in the West were called the Etheric or the Fifth Element, after Earth, Fire, Air and Water. Why do I say that much that these therapies have only half the answer? I prefer to use the term subtle "systems", to be a little more precise than saying "energies", for these subtle systems are composed of the inseparable twins:
1. Subtle energies and
2. The subtle fields that carry them.
Without energy the fields could not actualize, and without the fields, there would be nothing to carry the energy.
The next point is that underlying the subtle systems is the key to healing. Before even there were the subtle systems, there was an Informational matrix. This is a very scientific and clinical term for something that we also know as the Inner Light or your Inner Divine Spark. You have it: we all do. Aging, illness and death occur when this matrix degrades. Then the subtle systems become chaotic and the biochemical and cellular systems follow. When we treat someone with acupuncture or Reiki, it is not so much that we are squirting "energy" into him or her, but that we are giving that person’s whole organism some cleaned-up information that has a positive effect on the person receiving the treatment.
"Love is the immortal flow of energy that nourishes, extends and preserves. Its eternal goal is life."
–Smiley Blanton (American Speech Pathologist, Psychoanalyst, Writer and Founder {with Norman Vincent Peale} of the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, 1882-1966)
Technorati Tags: More blogs about Energy+Medicine.
Reiki Energy Healing
We Need Our Pets
In this week’s British Medical Journal there is a report on the effectivenesss of swimming with dolphins on alleviating mild to moderate depression.
This is just the latest, but perhaps best executed of reports of the beneficial effects of interacting with animals. Humans need touch and connection. We are the only higher mammal that does not routinely engage in mutual grooming. And we miss it.
There is more and more research evidence of something that every pet owner knows: that animals can experience emotion. They seem well able to experience happiness and pleasure. Though science hasn’t proven it, they can almost certainly also feel sadness and unhappiness. I have a horse whose original human friend passed away. I was told that he was not well, and my first question was, "Has anyone told him what happened?" This may seem an odd thing to say. But when I met the horse, he showed all the signs of clinical depression. And yes, I did talk to him, and explain what had happened to his human companion. He nuzzled me as he grieved. And today he is the happiest horse you could ever hope to meet.
The Chalice and the Blade is the title of an extraordinarily fine book by Riane Eisler, in which she shows that beliefs about society, nature and the world about us were very different just a few years ago, and utterly different a few thousand years ago. We have all been raised in educational and social systems that stress an unhealthy "dominator" model of society, in which one person dominates another, or we dominate and control nature. It should not be this way, and Eisler stresses a "partnership model" in which all relationships should be expressions of partnership, containing respect, harmony and love.
One of the most helpful and yet neglected things that we can do for ourselves and for others is to explore our relationships with other living things. Do you have any relationships with animals? Are they dominator or partnership? Do you talk about owning an animal or of sharing your life with one? Do you make time to be with animals? Do you notice any differences in the animals after they have spent time with you? Do you notice any difference in yourself?
We have just mentioned the new study and there here has been a lot of work on using horses in therapy, and there is good evidence that they can bring a wonderful new dimension to treatment. Some therapists have introduced visualization exercises based on horse riding to help people cope with anxiety, and have found that not only did it help with anxiety, it also deepened peoples’ sense of connection with themselves and with nature. And don’t neglect other creatures: how would you characterize your relationships with insects? Do you have a dominator relationship with them? Do you squish something you don’t like?
Think about it.
(As an aside to this story, I was musing about researchers based in the notoriously cold and wet English Midlands having the wisdom and perspicacity to do their research in Honduras. I’ll have to remember that the next time that I’m writing a grant proposal…)
Addendum: MSNBC has written a story "Into the Wild: A Scientific Approach" about the dolphin study published in the BMJ.
Technorati Tags: Pets Horses More blogs about Animal therapy.
