Good bye 2008

Happy New Year!

Best wishes to you, your family and all of your friends!

I hope that 2009 will be a prosperous year for you and one filled with love, kindness and gratitude!

All the very best,
-JD

Still Wondering if Acupuncture is the Placebo effect? Read here...

Acupuncture Proven to have an Effect beyond Placebo, Harvard Study Concludes
by Dave Gabriele, citizen journalist




(NaturalNews) Is acupuncture nothing more than a dressed-up placebo effect? Not according to a recent joint MIT-Harvard Medical School clinical study. The study, published in the November 2008 issue of the peer-reviewed science journal Behavioural Brain Research, utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) to examine the effects of acupuncture in relieving pain.

The effect of manual acupuncture in 12 healthy "acupuncture-naive" subjects (6 male, 6 female) was observed by monitoring fMRI of the brain and [11C]diprenorphine PET. [11C]Diprenorphine is used with PET to measure endogenous opioid release. Endogenous opioids have a morphine-like action in the body. Currently, "there is strong evidence that acupuncture analgesia is mediated at least in part by opioid systems" (Dougherty, et. al. p.1).

The Study

The randomized study separated subjects into a real acupuncture group and a placebo acupuncture group. The placebo treatment used a validated sham acupuncture needle (Streitberger placebo) so that the sensation was as close to real acupuncture as possible. Using a placebo is generally believed to eliminate any psychological effects, such as expectation or belief, which may corrupt a study.

During the course of four sessions, the researchers induced pain in the subjects by using heat in varying degrees of intensity. The heat pain, which was issued to the right forearm of each subject, was administered before and after a 29-min treatment of either real or placebo acupuncture at acupoint Large Intestine 4 (LI-4).

The fMRI was used to indentify changes in neural activity by measuring blood flow in the brain. The [11C]diprenorphine PET scans looked for binding decreases which is associated with greater opioid release.

The Results

By comparing the two treatments, the study concluded that "the reduction in pre- and post-treatment pain ratings was significantly greater in the acupuncture group when compared to the placebo group" (Dougherty, et. al. p.3).

"We found more brain changes during true acupuncture than during placebo acupuncture," commented Darin D. Dougherty, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of Neurotherapeutics at Massachusetts General Hospital. "fMRI showed changes in the orbitofrontal cortex, insula, and pons during true acupuncture when compared to placebo acupuncture." The PET scans detected [11C]diprenorphine binding changes during real acupuncture that were very different than the binding changes that occurred during placebo treatment.

The right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was the only brain region that showed a common change in both types of scans. During real acupuncture, the right OFC demonstrated increased activity (as determined by fMRI) and increased opioid release (as determined by PET). There were no common fMRI and PET changes during placebo acupuncture.

The data suggests that real acupuncture affects the brain differently than placebo acupuncture and is more effective than a placebo in reducing the experience of pain. When asked whether acupuncture is more than a placebo effect, Dr. Dougherty responded, "Yes, the study does show more changes in the brain during active acupuncture than during placebo acupuncture. Therefore, acupuncture certainly entails more than placebo effect."

NCCAM

This study was funded by The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). The NCCAM is the American Government`s lead agency for scientific research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). It is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

No longer something trendy...

Many Americans turning to unconventional medicine

By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - About four in 10 U.S. adults and one in nine children are turning to unconventional medical approaches for chronic pain and other health problems, health officials said on Wednesday.

Back pain was the leading reason that Americans reported using complementary and alternative medicine techniques, followed by neck and joint pain as well as arthritis, according to the survey by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 38 percent of adults used some form of complementary and alternative medicine in 2007, compared to 36 percent in 2002, the last time the government tracked at the matter.

For the first time, the survey looked at use of such medicine by children under age 18, finding that about 12 percent used it, officials said. The reasons included back pain, colds, anxiety, stress and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to the survey.

The risks for children using these are unclear, they said.

Complementary medicine is used together with conventional treatment, while alternative medicine is used instead. This includes such things as herbal medicines and other natural products, chiropractic techniques, acupuncture, massage, meditation and others.

Many people feel these may work better for them than typical medical approaches, with fewer bad side effects. And so-called natural products have become big business, too, with various herbal medicines and others emerging as lucrative products.

"As I look at this data, what I'm most struck with is how much people are turning to CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) approaches as part of the management of chronic pain conditions, particularly chronic back pain, but also neck pain and musculoskeletal pain and headache," said Dr. Josephine Briggs, director of the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the NIH.

"And from my days as an internist seeing patients in my office, I know that these are conditions that are hard to manage and tough to treat," Briggs told reporters.

Chiropractic care, acupuncture and massage therapy are among the complementary and alternative medicine techniques used for chronic pain, NIH researcher Richard Nahin said.

The survey results were based on responses from about 23,000 adults and 9,500 children nationwide.

Overall, the most common category of complementary and alternative medicine used was natural products such as herbal medicines and certain other types of dietary supplements other than vitamins and minerals.

Among these natural products used by adults, fish oil was the most commonly used. Nahin said it is used for such reasons as high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

Nahin said use of complementary and alternative medicine seems to be remaining at a significant but stable level, with most of the recent increases among those age 60 and up.

Deep breathing exercises, meditation and massage therapy all showed significant increases among adults. Overall, women and people with higher levels of education were more likely to use complementary and alternative medicine techniques.

Echinacea, a medicinal plant sometimes used to treat or prevent colds, was the most common of the natural products used by children, according to the survey. Echinacea use dropped among adults from 2002 to 2007, Nahin said.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Cynthia Osterman)

Shining Eyes

This is one of those posts that really has nothing to do with Chinese Medicine, but rather everything to do with the Human Condition. I hope you receive as much inspiration from it as I did. And who knows, it may even make you want to go out and get some music from Chopin...
-JD
(see the video below)
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Research finds Happiness is Contagious!

Found this great article on MSNBC today discussing how new research finds that your mood and more specifically your happiness can actually be contagious...

interested? read below...

Study shows friends and even strangers benefit from your cheery mood
By Melissa Dahl
Health writer
msnbc.com


Feeling inexplicably cheery today? Thank your friends. And your friends’ friends. And your friends’ friends’ friends.

New research shows that happiness isn’t just an individual phenomenon; we can catch happiness from friends and family members like an emotional virus. When just one person in a group becomes happy, researchers were able to measure a three-degree spread of that person’s cheer. In other words, our moods can brighten thanks to someone we haven’t even met.

“Especially in the United States, we’re very used to thinking of ourselves as rugged individuals. But even very small things that happen to us have big impacts on dozens and hundreds of other people,” says James Fowler, a University of California, San Diego, political scientist, who co-authored the study with Harvard University medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis. “The things that we do and the things that we feel are going to reverberate throughout our social network.”

On average, every happy person in your social network increases your own chance of cheer by 9 percent — and the effects of catching someone else’s happiness lasts up to one year. The study, which looked at nearly 5,000 individuals over 20 years, was published online Thursday in the British Medical Journal.

Fowler and Christakis were able to map the social networks of 4,739 individuals with data from the Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing cardiovascular study. Participants in that study listed contact information for their closest friends, family members and neighbors, connecting the pair of researchers to more than 50,000 social ties. Fowler and Christakis have used that data set for similar studies published in the last two years that showed how obesity and smoking cessation can spread throughout a social network. The researchers used the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Index — a standard set of questions psychologists use to measure happiness — to analyze the cheeriness of the study participants. They found that when someone gets happy, that person’s friend experiences a 25 percent increased chance of becoming happy. A friend of that friend experiences a nearly 10 percent chance of increased happiness, and a friend of that friend has a 5.6 percent increased chance of happiness.

That means a stranger’s good mood can do more to lift your spirits than a $5,000 raise, which only increased happiness 2 percent, Fowler and Christakis found.

“Happiness is a social emotion. It's an emotion that we derive from social events, and very typically and it becomes important for cementing the social connections we have with others,” says Jack Dovidio, a Yale University social psychologist who was not involved in the study. “Happiness is not simply about me.”

What’s more, all these happy people could be helping to keep each other healthy. Several recent medical studies have linked happiness and health, including a 2006 Carnegie Mellon University study that found buoyant personality types catch fewer colds than downers. And a 2001 University of Kentucky at Lexington study used the handwritten autobiographies of 180 Catholic nuns to judge the effect of happiness on longevity: The nuns who used more positive words to describe their lives lived about 10 years longer than those who used more negative words to describe their lives.

“It does appear possibly to be a causal affect — that being happier actually makes you healthier,” Fowler says.

But it seems you can’t catch happiness over the phone. Fowler and Christakis found that the increase in happiness only affects friends who live within a mile away from each other. “For emotions, it appears that distance is really important,” Fowler says. “Friends who are close have an affect; friends who are far away don’t. The less you’re in contact with somebody the less likely you are to catch their happiness.”

The one-mile finding in the study is sure to sound odd to close friends who may live across town from each other. But Fowler says the key seems to be in how frequently you see your friends and those living closest saw each other the most often. (He says when they looked at the effect of happiness on friends who lived more than a mile apart, the results were too inconsistent to be anything more than chance.)

Sadness isn't as catching
On the flip side, if you’re feeling blue, you’ve only yourself to blame. Sadness doesn’t infect a social group as reliably happiness does, researchers found. Within some friendship networks, sadness had a significant effect on the members of the group, but on others, the effect was very small.

“With sadness, rather than pulling you in to your social network you often push people away,” says Emory University psychologist Nadine Kaslow, who wasn’t involved in this study. “Even though we know social support is really good for us when we’re sad, when we need it the most, we tend to push people away.” It might be a matter of private, personal emotions versus those that are meant to be shared. Anger, for example, might be another outward emotion that would spread within a group the same way happiness does, suggests Dovidio.

“When we are close to somebody, we actually have kind of a merging of our self image,” Dovidio says. And an infectious case of cheer can help cement connections within a group of friends, he adds, because it can re-affirm how close those relationships are.

“People often get a sense of happiness, even though they don't know where it comes from; it's probably very likely to come from the happiness of other people,” Dovidio says. “If I can't locate where my happiness came from it's likely that it came from another person.”

Once Fowler realized how far-reaching his own good cheer actually is, he has begun to make some changes to ensure he’s in a chipper mood more often. Lately, in the evenings on the drive home from work, just before pulling up to his house, he turns on a tune that’s almost too happy: Hoku’s “Perfect Day.” By the time he gets home, he has a giddy, goofy mood to match the pop song, and he hopes that his happiness will rub off on his two boys, 8-year-old Lucas and 6-year-old Jay.

“I’m not just going to make my sons happy — I could potentially make my sons’ friends happy,” Fowler says. “These little things I thought I was doing for myself turn out to be for hundreds of people.”
© 2008 msnbc.com

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28058552/