Acupuncture
Acupuncture for Sports Injuries
Whether you are a professional, college, or high school athlete (or maybe just a weekend warrior), you know that injuries can happen when you least expect it. Sometimes, it’s a traumatic injury because your body was pushed beyond its limit and sometimes, the injury comes from simple overuse. And every athlete wants to get back on the field, court, or track as quickly as possible. continue reading
How Acupuncture Can Improve Lung Health
The health of our lungs isn’t necessarily talked about a lot when general health is discussed. Typically, cardiovascular health, chronic pain, cholesterol and stroke risk tend to be the more common topics. Many don’t think about lung health until there is a problem and then improving it becomes priority number one. continue reading
What Causes Disease? Something New or Something Old?
A common question from health care providers to patients during initial intakes around the inception of their chief complaint is: “Did anything new happen or significantly change in your life just before this started?”
If we are looking at an orthopedic issue this might be in suggestion to some physical trauma or accident. If the issue is more psychological, we’re inquiring clearly more around emotional trauma or incident. Either way, no matter the medical paradigm it is always helpful to know what, if anything, was the final straw, and/or only straw, to induce a present pathology.
Where medicine gets tricky is in approximately half of the times when the patient responds: “Nothing… nothing changed.” Nothing new or bad happened.
In this case it is logical to look at genetic tendencies finally rearing latent heads, but I am more inclined to examine patient habits and lifestyles finally catching up to them. Everyone knows that a few cigarettes, or even a few years of cigarettes, do not cause chronic illness, so why should a short or even medium interim of any harmful pattern under the umbrella of self-care?
How many years does it take for a lack of exercise to cause disease? How many years does it take for nightly desserts, social alcohol use, or haphazard use of pharmaceuticals to?
“The last straw(s)” is an etiology which poses a greater challenge to patients’ self-awareness, curiosity, and/or open-mindedness. Being confronted with what we might have been doing wrong for years, if not decades—where our responsibility lies—poses a threat to our ego, our belief systems, as well as our simple energy in its implicit requisite of critical thought, experimentation, and will power to examine what we could/should change. Nevertheless, scientific logic would dictate this to be at least one irrefutable contributing factor to disease.
When “nothing changed” just prior to onset of symptoms, what percentage of causality can we intelligently assign to genetics alone? Thirty percent? Sixty? Maybe ninety on occasion? I am skeptical it is very often 100%, lest I would personally be relegated to medications for gout disease, eczema, and an anxiety disorder.
I recommend to all patients, myself included, to be open, to the idea that although we probably haven’t been wrong about everything, we are just as likely wrong about some of the things we do, especially whilst in the context of seeking help.
Please don’t get me wrong: As much of a pet peeve it is for me to work with patients who take no responsibility for their conditions and/or wield a particularly narrow-minded arrogance around the infallibility of their choices, it is equally unacceptable when health care providers put the entire onus on the patient. The healing process, in my opinion, is not only a marathon-like process of scientific experimentation, but a team process, that usually requires approximately half of contribution from both parties. I’ve heard many colleagues criticize patients’ desire for us to “fix them.” Obviously, I agree, people must take responsibility for their health. At the same time, most chronic conditions need the outside support and help from professionals as well.
Chinese Medicine Breakfast Ideas
I’m not sure what the time or place was that berthed the maxim, Breakfast is the most important meal, but they were obviously more attuned with human biology than our own. In Chinese Medicine’s circadian clock, 7am-9am is considered the “time of the stomach.” The prior, 5-7am, corresponds to the large intestine, which makes it the ideal and most common time for bowel movements; before that, 3-5am, to the lungs, which is why many people with chronic or acute coughs are disrupted by them in the middle of the night.
While this may all sound like esoteric medical theory, it aligns perfectly with modern biomedical understanding: The reason 7-9am is the time of the stomach is because it is when metabolism is strongest—when our bodies are most sensitive to the insulin hormone, whose job it is to break down glucose from food and transform it into nutrients.
We say “stomach qi.” They say insulin secretion. Same thing. Of course, when people lack a morning appetite or experience a weaker metabolism in the morning we consider this to be pathological, diagnostically informative. Since for most of us 8am is at least 12 hours since our last meal this should not sound far-fetched. Chinese Medicine believes when we do not adequately exercise our microbiome in the morning we weaken it—a similar use it or lose it view as to the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that are ultimately nourished by the gut as well.
Intermittent fasting can have many health benefits when done responsibly, but if one intends to do it intelligently, without potentially robbing Peter to pay Paul in the long term, you would skip or have an early dinner, instead of neglecting science by skipping breakfast. I understand the potential social repercussions of this, for which I recommend compromise: Have dinner or later dinners on social nights, while on quiet nights, if it works for you keep to your fasting window.
For those who claim to not have time for breakfast, I am skeptical. As most of you know, for the past year I’ve been still running my own practice while co-parenting a 14-month old. Recently, as she has rapidly grown in physical mobility and emotional attachment, I’ve been forced to cook with one hand and arm in the morning. I’ve learned to crack and cook eggs all with one (messy) hand, and inadvertently multi-tasked into giving my left bicep a tremendous daily workout. Even on my earlier days in the office we never skip breakfast.
One of my favorite and easiest recipes are as shown above, eggs over easy with ANY roasted vegetables. As long as you can find the five minutes to wash and chop the veggies, you can then throw them on the pan, add salt, pepper, garlic powder, and flaxseed, and cook for 20 minutes, during which time you can get ready for the day (or sit cross-legged on the floor and read children’s books). When they are a few minutes from ready return to the kitchen for your one-minute, one-handed eggs. Once plated I like to add a good quality olive-oil atop the vegetables, a) to give them moisture, b) for olive oil’s health benefits. Viola! Breakfast!
In Chinese Medicine eggs are considered one of the healthiest foods in the world. They even appear in a couple of our herbal formulas that are designed to clear pathological heat from the body by nourishing our healthy fluids and blood. Between my wife, daughter, and I, we consume 3 dozen/week, and I can’t imagine where we’d be if we didn’t. Bon Appetit!
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Acupuncture as an Alternative to Opioids
According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, almost 50,000 people die every year from opioid overdoses, more than 10 million misuse opioids in a given year, and opioids are a factor in 72% of overdose deaths. You hear about the opioid crisis on the nightly news frequently but what can be done to help people deal with chronic pain (the reason they are likely taking the opioids in the first place). Can acupuncture really help? continue reading
