BBC, BBC, pour some sugar on me

Ah, the lure of a good headline. Rather irresistible, don't you think? But I'm actually not talking about the title of this post, but the headline of a recent BBC article which read: Do toddlers need cake as well as carrots?

The article is a report about a study of meals served to children in British nursery schools. The study found that none of the schools managed "to meet all of the current guidelines on food for this age group." This included serving meals high in salt, too big or too small in size, and with too much fruit. The fruit, they say, could potentially make them so full, they're not getting enough good fat and protein, or enough carbs.

Well, the BBC ran with this one, because the next best thing to eating sugar is selling everyone on the idea that we should be eating more sugar. And they did just that: They found a pediatric nutritionist to claim that "parents really shouldn't feel too anxious about puddings - sponge and custard is a good dessert to offer, surprising as that may sound. This is a much better option than a handful of biscuits between meals."

First of all, biscuits—especially the UK variety—are made from refined carbohydrates, flour as refined as what's in cake. Secondly, how did they manage to make the leap from "Don't eat too much fruit" to "Eat cake and custard?" So much for responsible reportage. And never mind that human infants have done quite well without refined sugars for about 200,000 years.

Ironically another article, short on the heels of this story, stated that a lot of breakfast cereals have as much (or more) sugar than some cakes. But this is no surprise really, considering breakfast cereals are mostly flour and sugar. As an example, Weetabix Minis Chocolate Crisp, a UK cereal, has 28.2 g of sugar in a 100 g serving. That's more than 25% sugar. If you estimate that there are 4 g of sugar per teaspoon, that would be equivalent to adding 7 teaspoons of sugar to your cereal.

If you would still like to reduce the amount of fruit per the above guidelines, please consider other whole food, unrefined carbohydrates before having your child toddle off on the road to obesity and diabetes. Some of them are, in no particular order, peas, corn, potatoes, yams, sweet potatoes, squash, pumpkin, beans, yoghurt, oatmeal, beets, and carrots.

Pain is so 21st century...BC

Latest breaking news from the UK medical community: “Pain should be viewed as a disease in its own right.” Now there’s a concept, except that it’s several millennia old. But I’ll get to that in a second.

This epiphany of theirs stems from a few reasons: one, because employees are calling sick due to pain-related issues; two, because most pain doesn’t have a known cause; and three, because, well, it’s not right for people to suffer so much. Oh, yeah. That.

The odd thing here is that they want to do more investigation into how the nervous system works when it comes to pain syndromes so that they can come up with effective intervention strategies. There is mention of physiotherapy as an aid (this is a good thing), and they also bring up distraction. (Denial can be useful, too, in a pinch, but they didn’t mention that one.) And, of course, they want more pharmaceuticals to choose from. Apparently there haven’t been enough new drugs developed in recent years to mask—oops, I mean, treat—pain.

OK. So why is this issue so close to me? Well, for starters, the cause of pain is one of the most basic principles of Chinese Medicine. Check this ancient Chinese saying out:

Without free flow, there is pain. If there is free flow, there is no pain.

Simple, huh? Now if we can figure out how to get everything flowing freely, we’d have it made. Wait, we do! It’s called acupuncture and Chinese Medicine. It’s called yoga, qi gong, t’ai chi. It’s called movement and exercise. It’s called bodywork. It’s called emotional and spiritual therapy. It’s called singing, dancing, laughing, loving. It’s called anything that frees up whatever is stuck in your life.

Is it a coincidence that these tools can help people with their insomnia, anxiety, depression, stress, GI problems, menstrual difficulties, high blood pressure, and drug side effects, in addition to what’s generally thought of as that thing that hurts? Not at all. Until these docs redefine their idea of what pain is, they will be stymied, and they will end up peddling stuckness.

For those who think acupuncture is just a metal thingy that pokes you...

OK. So, acupuncture's been in the news a lot lately, more than ever. Talk show hosts are inviting acupuncturists to, you know, talk about what they do. They even have acupuncture as a regular thing on t.v. serials, like Eli Stone.

Even researchers are paying more attention to it, specifically the Cochrane Review, which looks at all studies pertaining to acupuncture and its effects on a particular condition, compounds the results, and analyzes them. And the latest buzz is that "sham acupuncture" (needling "fake" points) is as good as the real thing (needling points that are documented in text books), and that either is better than other therapies.

Here's the latest from the BBC on acupuncture and headaches.

On the surface it seems like good news for the acupuncture profession. I mean, it works, right?--even if you don't really need to go to school for four years to get your masters degree, since sticking a needle anywhere will work.

Yeah, well, not exactly. First and foremost, when researchers prepare a study à la the scientific method, the only way to do it is to test an hypothesis, which means they have to study the effect of needling the same acupuncture point or set of acupuncture points on everyone's headache, for example. But acupuncture is a part of Chinese medicine, and Chinese medicine will *always* tell you that different people need different treatments: We're unique, we have different DNA, different diets, different lifestyles, different "hiccups" in our well-being over the years. Why shouldn't we get unique treatments tailored specifically for us? And yet, the scientific method declares that acupuncture cannot be studied if we treat people as individuals.

So...Conclusion #1: It's not that sham acupuncture is as good as real acupuncture; it's that it's all bad acupuncture in these studies.

Second, research on acupuncture requires that different practitioners will provide the exact same needling to different patients in the exact same locations. Hmmm. Not quite sure how that's going to happen, when you have (again) different people of different heights (you can't measure three inches from, say, the navel, cause you'll end up proportionally in a different place on each person), or different weights (stick a needle in 1 mm on a morbidly obese person and it hasn't gone into the same level of tissue on the body as a really thin person). This is not to mention differences in education or needling style of the practitioners in the study.

Conclusion #2: It's all bad acupuncture.

Third and last (I promise), acupuncture is not about this piece of metal that's somehow doing the healing. It's not about sticking a patient and causing pain so there's a release of endorphins or opioids in the body. It's about connecting with a person's Qi, their life force, something that cannot be seen on an MRI or measured with a volt meter. It's about utilizing a powerful tool (the needle) to focus the practitioner's Qi in order to guide the patient's Qi, and to awaken a person's innate ability to heal oneself.

Conclusion #3: You have to take the human out of the equation to do the scientific method, but there is no way to take the human out of true Chinese medicine.

And the moral of this story? If you want real acupuncture, see a real acupuncturist, and stay away from the studies.

The Heart of the Matter

One thing practitioners of Chinese Medicine continually take notice of is how contemporary research discovers what we have taken for granted as part of our age-old tradition--a teaching that has wisdom, philosophy, and thousands of years of experience holding it together. The most recent example of this is how people with insomnia are more likely to have heart disease. (You can read about it here in the New York Times.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the Heart rules the sleep. This means that things that affect the Heart's ability to function properly can affect the sleep. The opposite is also true; that insufficient or poor quality sleep will affect the Heart. And in TCM, this organ can be damaged by many other factors, including emotional upset and stress, over-thinking, poor diet and digestive function, weak Kidney function, menopause, and fiery medicinals like sugar, cigarettes, pot, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, and other recreational drugs).

Other symptoms of Heart dysfunction are: excessive/disturbing dreams, poor memory and concentration, heart racing or skipped beats, chest tightness and pain, anxiety, mania, excessive or inappropriate laughter, agitation, a lack of spirit in the eyes, menstrual irregularities, sexual dysfunction, and an inability to speak clearly.

It's always exciting to me when Western medicine finally "catches up" with traditional medicine, because then we come one step closer to developing a confluent language and understanding of how we can best support a person's health care needs. The good news is that acupuncture and Chinese herbs can help with these difficulties, and a thorough evaluation will help determine which underlying disharmony may be affecting the Heart.

As always, if you have symptoms that are especially of concern to you, a consultation with your Medical Doctor may be important to rule out any more serious causes of illness.

[Image Source.]

Without Freedom of Flow, There is Pain

The title above is a fundamental principle in Chinese Medicine, the other half of which is: With No Pain, There is Freedom of Flow. In this saying, "freedom of flow" refers to the free flow of Chi (our body's life force) and Blood. And "pain" is defined broadly in Chinese Medicine as anything outside the optimal functioning of the body, including discomfort, tightness, lack of ease or balance, emotional disturbances, and the list goes on. The beauty of Chinese Medicine is not only that it provides very applicable means of creating free-flow, but that there are a number of reasons why an interruption in this free-flow may occur.

This is not to say that Chinese Medicine can cure everything; depending on the person, one of a number of wonderful holistic modalities may be optimal in creating free-flow in one's life, such as massage, exercise, yoga, tai chi, qi gong, meditation, counseling, and other forms of energy work. Finding the right modality or modalities to treat what is creating the dis-ease in your life is important to discover for yourself.

In the Western model of allopathic medicine, if they can't see the problem, it doesn't exist. This presents numerous problems for people with soft-tissue injuries or other causes of pain that don't show up in X-rays, CTs, or MRIs. Furthermore, researchers are discovering that if something does show up on imaging, such as a bulging disc, then that does not necessarily mean that what they are seeing is the actual cause of pain. In other words, people with verifiable abnormalities in tissues are not necessarily in pain, and people in pain do not necessarily have verifiable or imageable abnormalities in the body. This pertains to musculoskeletal disorders, endometriosis/menstrual pains, headache, and again, the list goes on.

If you want to read more about this, go to the New York Times article here.

Hopefully, what doctors are discovering is that pain syndromes are often best approached with conservative, non-invasive treatments, and that there is no undoing the potential harm of surgery. By all means surgery can be an important and necessary intervention in a person's life. Just be sure you're comfortable with the decision and try some other forms of therapy first.

You Are What You... Are

This article from the New York Times reports on a study published the the Archives of Internal Medicine. The gist of it: Overweight people can be healthy and people who have weights within the "healthy" range can have disease markers traditionally associated with the overweight.

One of the tenets of Traditional Chinese Medicine is that people are individuals and need to be treated as such. I've had patients come to me and say that their doctors ruled out gall bladder disease because they weren't "fat, female, and forty." But my experience is that environmental, emotional, and dietary stressors will affect people of all shapes and sizes, and will have an adverse effect on markers such as cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood sugar.

If you like you may read the published study.

You might also want to check out Sally Fallon's website. She's the author of Nourishing Traditions, and has been challenging status quo medical advice on diet and nutrition for years.

Acupuncture Significantly Reduces Post-Surgical Pain

In a study analyzing 15 clinical trials, scientists at Duke University concluded that acupuncture greatly reduced post-surgical pain, thereby reducing the need for post-operative painkillers. Patients who received acupuncture in these studies experienced 1.5 times less nausea and 1.6 times less dizziness, as well as 3.5 times less urinary retention than patients in the studies who had not received acupuncture.

Dr. Tong-Joo Gan, vice chairman of Duke's anesthesiology department, said in a telephone interview, "Western doctors are typically not trained (in acupuncture) and they really are not familiar with how it works. I think practitioners such as surgeons and anesthesiologists need to have an open mind."

The Reuters article is available here.