Tai Chi For Health Offers Relief from Parkinson’s, Arthritis and More
Thus far, mainstream medicine has offered no cure for Parkinson’s disease, despite the fact that this tragic neurological disorder afflicts a rising number of victims each year. An estimated 60,000 new cases of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are diagnosed annually, and neurological disorders in general are on a steep rise.
Worse yet, the drugs that are currently available have major drawbacks. That’s why it’s so promising that new research by Fushong Li of the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene, Oregon, indicates a better way: tai chi (pronounced TIE-chee).
According to Li’s study, tai chi for health can positively those with PD, arthritis, fibromyalgia, depression, and more.
Tai chi is sometimes described as “meditation in motion.” The practice originates from a traditional Chinese method of self-defense, but has evolved over the centuries into a form of exercise that’s ideal for stress reduction and relief of many other health conditions.
For the Oregon Research Institute study, 195 individuals with mild to moderate PD were divided into three groups. Each group used a different exercise model—resistance (weight training), stretching, or tai chi—for 6 months. The study, funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2012, found that tai chi for health had by far the most positive results.
Tai chi for health had a much more pronounced impact on many of the most common problems for PD patients, such as:
• Posture problems
• Problems with gait
• Balance issues
• General functional abilities
Prior studies on the positive effects of tai chi for health have found that it can decrease pain and insomnia for patients with fibromyalgia and arthritis. It can also alleviate chronic depression, especially in older adults.
Experts believe tai chi may work by restoring dopamine production to the brain. More studies on tai chi for health as a treatment for Parkinson’s and other neurological conditions are sure to be forthcoming.
Original article and pictures take www.corespirit.com site
Tai chi and other traditional Chinese exercises may benefit people with heart disease, researchers report.
The new review of 35 studies included more than 2,200 people in 10 countries. The investigators found that, among people with heart disease, these types of low-risk activities appeared to help lower blood pressure and levels of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and other unhealthy blood fats.
Tai chi, qigong and other traditional Chinese exercises were also linked to improved quality of life and reduced depression in heart disease patients, the study authors added.
But the exercises did not significantly improve heart rate, aerobic fitness levels or general health scores, according to the report published March 9 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
“Traditional Chinese exercises are a low-risk, promising intervention that could be helpful in improving quality of life in patients with cardiovascular diseases — the leading cause of disability and death in the world,” study co-author Yu Liu, said in a journal news release.
“But the physical and psychological benefits to these patients of this increasingly popular form of exercise must be determined based on scientific evidence,” added Liu. He is dean of the School of Kinesiology at Shanghai University of Sport in China.
The association reported in the study doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship between activities such as tai chi and improved heart health.
But, the researchers said they plan to conduct randomized, controlled trials — the gold standard for scientific research — to review the effect of different types of traditional Chinese exercises on chronic diseases.
Original article and pictures take www.corespirit.com site
Tai Chi and Its Benefits Taichi is often referred to as “meditation in motion” requiring concentration and accompanied by deep breathing. It consists of graceful, flowing movements and postures that transition smoothly into each other without pause.
As the world’s population ages, exercise has become increasingly important as a tool to prevent and manage the chronic illnesses that are affecting larger portions of society. Tai Chi (also known as Shadow Boxing) has evolved from its original ancient Chinese form of self-defense to a modern-day, gentle form of exercise and stretching.
It is often referred to as “meditation in motion” requiring concentration and accompanied by deep breathing. It consists of graceful, flowing movements and postures that transition smoothly into each other without pause.
About Tai Chi
Tai Chi is grounded in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism. This philosophy emphasizes the natural balance in all things and encourages spiritual and physical harmony with nature. It surrounds the relationship of perpetual balance between the two opposing but complementary elements of yin and yang. The effectiveness of the Tai Chi exercises is believed to lie in the perfect balance between yin and yang.
There are varying styles of Tai Chi based on its different principles and methods. While some styles focus on the healthful aspects, others are more concerned with the traditional martial arts aspects of Tai Chi.
Benefits of Tai Chi
It is considered safe for all fitness levels and ages, due to the fact that it is low impact with minimal stress on muscles and joints.
Taichi has been shown to reduce joint pain.
Taichi requires no specialized equipment and is therefore an inexpensive form of exercise.
It may be done anywhere and at any time, whether alone or as part of a group.
Tai Chi improves your mood and helps to a decrease anxiety, depression and stress.
A regular practice of Tai Chi movements improves muscle definition and strength with consequent increases in stamina and energy.
Persons who practice this form of exercise experience improvements in their agility, balance and flexibility.
Taichi is shown to increase aerobic capacity of the maximum amount of oxygen the body is able to use during physical activity.
It is believed that Tai Chi can contribute to a better quality of sleep, leaving practitioners feeling more rested and rejuvenated.
Taichi has been said to help lower blood pressure and as such aids overall heart health.
The immune system is boosted by the practice of Tai Chi, making those who practice it benefit from greater general wellness.
Tai Chi is practiced worldwide by as many as 300 million people. It is considered as an effective approach to maintaining health and improving the quality of daily life.
Original article and pictures take www.acupuncture-treatment.com site
Tai chi produces the same benefits as physical therapy for patients suffering from knee osteoarthritis, according to a new study by researchers at the Tufts School of Medicine.
The study, led by Chenchen Wang, a professor at the School of Medicine, focused on osteoarthritis patients who reported significant pain. The average participant was 60 years old, and many were obese. “This was a really representative sample of patients we see in our clinical practice at Tufts Medical Center every day,” says Wang, director of the Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine at Tufts Medical Center.
Wang defines tai chi in her studies as a multi-component traditional Chinese mind-body practice that combines meditation with slow, gentle, graceful movements, deep diaphragmatic breathing, and relaxation.
Patients were randomly assigned to either do tai chi twice a week for 12 weeks with an instructor with 10 to 30 years of experience, or undergo physical therapy twice a week at Tufts Medical Center for six weeks and then do six weeks of exercise at home. At the end of the 12 weeks, the tai chi and physical therapy groups reported equal improvement in pain and related health outcomes, effects that remained 52 weeks after the start of the study.
“Six weeks is very expensive with a physical therapist,” says Wang, who is a member of the National Advisory Council for Complementary and Integrative Health
at the National Institutes of Health. By comparison, “tai chi is relatively cheap, and you can get it in a lot of places,” she notes.
The effects were the same across the four tai chi instructors, she adds, showing the protocol is easy to learn and perform successfully. “Everyone can do this,” she says.
Further, the tai chi group showed significantly more improvement than the physical therapy group when it came to depression and quality of life. “By integrating physical, psychosocial, emotional, spiritual and behavioral elements, tai chi may systematically promote health by its effect on both the body and the mind,” according to the study, which was published online May 17 in advance of print publication in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
“These people never knew what tai chi was. But when we brought them to the tai chi room at Tufts Medical Center week by week, we saw them changing to become happier, healthier people,” says Wang, who watched patients’ progress on video. “It was very exciting to see every day.”
The study conclusion: “Standardized tai chi should be considered as an effective therapeutic option for knee osteoarthritis.”
Rise of Integrated Medicine
Times have certainly changed since Wang conducted her first study in 2008 at Tufts showing that tai chi alleviates pain in knee osteoarthritis patients. For that research, the 40 patients and single instructor practiced the ancient Chinese martial art in a conference room. “When there were meetings, patients would stand outside and wait,” says Wang.
Her most recent study was a different story. It included 204 patients and four instructors, the largest group in any tai chi study, and they practiced in a dedicated tai chi room.
Wang has seen a greater accommodation in the medical world’s attitude toward tai chi as well. “After 10 to 20 years doing this work, I think integrated medicine is becoming popular now,” Wang says. “Everyone realizes its importance.”
Now Wang is planning on studying the mechanism by which tai chi produces its benefits. She has been conducting brain imaging studies to more closely examine the biological psychology and social aspects of the treatment, and also will estimate the net health-care spending reduction of offering tai chi as an alternative to physical therapy.
Tai chi could benefit more than just osteoarthritis patients, says Wang. She has also found that it promotes cardiovascular fitness and reduces pain associated with fibromyalgia.
“When I came to North America and I saw people use pain medication, I was so surprised. I asked, ‘Why would you use something like this?’” says Wang, who grew up watching her mother, a Chinese physician, rely on traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture, combined with Western medicine.
“This is the main reason I became a physician and scientist, and I think more young people and health-care professionals should realize the importance of this field,” she says. “Complementary and integrated medicine is a big field now—whatever patients need, this provides the best care.”
Original article and pictures take www.corespirit.com site
Study Reveals How Chinese Skullcap Makes Anti-Cancer Compounds
A new study, published in the journal Science Advances, has revealed how the popular Chinese herbal remedy Huang-Qin (Scutellaria baicalensis) — also known as the Chinese skullcap — produces compounds which may help to treat cancer and liver diseases.
Chinese skullcap is cultivated in China, Siberia, Mongolia and Korea. It is an herb used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat a variety of conditions including epilepsy, hepatitis, infections, and cancer. It is often used in combination with other botanicals such as PC-SPES and sho-saiko-to.
Previous research on cells cultured in the lab has shown that certain compounds called flavones — found in the roots of the Chinese skullcap — not only have beneficial anti-viral and anti-oxidant effects, but they can also kill human cancer cells while leaving healthy cells untouched.
In live animal models, these flavones have also halted tumor growth, offering hope that they may one day lead to effective cancer treatments, or even cures.
As a group of compounds, the flavones are relatively well understood. But the beneficial flavones found in the roots of the Chinese skullcap — such as wogonin and baicalin — are different: a missing hydroxyl (-OH) group in their chemical structure left scientists scratching their heads as to how they were made in the plant.
“Many flavones are synthesized using a compound called naringenin as a building block,” said study senior author Prof. Cathie Martin, from the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK.
“But naringenin has this -OH group attached to it, and there is no known enzyme that will remove it to produce the flavones we find in the Chinese skullcap roots.”
Prof. Cathie and her colleagues explored the possibility that Chinese skullcap’s root-specific flavones (RSFs) were made via a different biochemical pathway.
Step-by-step, they unraveled the mechanism involving new enzymes that make RSFs using a different building block called chrysin.
“We believe that this biosynthetic pathway has evolved relatively recently in Scutellaria roots, diverging from the classical pathway that produces flavones in leaves and flowers, specifically to produce chrysin and its derived flavones,” Prof. Martin said.
“Understanding the pathway should help us to produce these special flavones in large quantities, which will enable further research into their potential medicinal uses.”
“It’s exciting to consider that the plants which have been used as traditional Chinese remedies for thousands of years may lead to effective modern medicines,” she added.
Original article and pictures take www.corespirit.com site
An article that I stumbled across this week in Medscape Medical News which is an online mainstream medical news publication discussed the findings of a study which demonstrated acupuncture's effectiveness in treating hot flushes in women associated with cancer drug therapy.
There were 120 participants in the trial whereby either electro acupuncture, gabbapentin (an anti-epeleptic medication), sham acupuncture and placebo treatments were administered over an 8 week period. At the end of the 8 weeks and again later at 24 weeks the results showed acupuncture was the most effective at reducing the hot flushes and maintaining that reduction even 16 weeks after acupuncture treatments ceased.
Studies have also demonstrated that acupuncture can be helpful in reducing cancer treatment related nausea.
Ahhhh, end-August! This is the time of year when the hot sunny days begin to be tempered by less muggy breezes at night. That small hint of coolness creeping in reminds us that autumn is just around the corner.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), there are not four but five seasons. The additional season, ‘Late Summer’, is considered the “hinge between hot and cold seasons, uniting yin and yang”. This observation is from a beautiful book, the Huang Di Nei Jing (The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine). It was written about 2,000 years ago. Not only is it a classical TCM text still studied by acupuncture students today, it is also a lifestyle guide with advice on health optimization. There are even directions on how best to sleep throughout the year according to the seasons. In general, we can take cues from our environment and work with the seasons. For example, in the summer we can stay up a bit later and rise a bit earlier than usual, thus following the sun’s pattern, benefiting from the season’s warmth and sunshine (“Yang” energy). In the fall, we can start to turn in a bit earlier but still rise early.
August and September are a pivotal time when we slowly change gears from summer’s looser, freer timetable (long weekends, vacation time, children out of school and at camps) to autumn’s much more regulated and disciplined work and school activities. For the sleep-deficient among us, this can be a challenge. Just when we are feeling like we’re finally getting some rest on vacation, it is time to get back to our regular lives of alarm clocks and stressful commutes.
We know that we feel better when we sleep well. Did you also know that good sleep helps maintain our memory, reaction times, emotional functioning and decision making skills? In a recent CBC episode of The Nature of Things, the relationship between good sleep and a healthy appetite was discussed. If you have ever experienced an increase in appetite after a night or two of poor sleep, you will be interested to know that some research supports this phenomenon.
Here are some suggestions to help you get the most out of your sleep time so that you will be refreshed and well rested, ready to tackle whatever the day has in store for you.
In general we can apply good sleep hygiene principles:
Reserve your bedroom for sleep and intimacy, not for eating, studying, watching TV, or using electronic devices
Keep your bedroom dark, well ventilated, and at a comfortable temperature
Use a good quality mattress and pillows (mattresses and pillows do wear out; refresh a mattress after approximately 10 years and a pillow after a year or two)
Stick to a schedule – go to bed and rise at approximately the same time every night (consider the Yellow Emperor’s suggestion to flex the times a bit throughout the year), whether it is a weekday or weekend, vacation or work day
However, we should balance this with going to sleep when we are tired – forcing ourselves to lie in bed at a designated time can make us feel frustrated instead of relaxed
More strenuous exercise should be done earlier in the day; relaxation exercises can be done at night
Turn off electronic devices, especially interactive technology, an hour or two before bedtime
Avoid high energy or stressful TV viewing later at night; read inspiring and uplifting books instead
Eat your last meal of the day at least three hours before turning in – digestion will interfere with sound sleep and lying down will interfere with optimal digestion
Consider changing the paradigm of supper being the largest meal of the day to the smallest with Yellow Emperor’s suggestion to ‘eat like a king at breakfast, a prince at lunch, and a pauper at supper’
Avoid very spicy food, caffeine, alcohol and nicotine before bed; they are all stimulating and can disturb sleep
Have a warm bath and consider adding calming herbs to the water:
Wrap a handful of lemon balm, lavender or rose petals in a square of cheesecloth and tie tightly
Place the wrapped herbs into the tub and run the water over it
When the tub is full, remove the herbs and enjoy the bath
Treat yourself to a cup of calming herbal tea before bedtime
Chamomile, lavender, lemon balm or peppermint can be helpful
Some tea companies have specific blends to help support sleep and may contain additional herbs such as valerian or kava kava root
Other soothing food and drink to try contain significant calcium and magnesium:
A cup of warm milk with a teaspoon of honey
A small handful of almonds
From TCM dietary therapy, there are some additional options to consider. Lemons are considered helpful for calming the mind and relieving insomnia. Mulberry or Longan fruit (looks like a smaller, darker litchi) can be consumed fresh or, in the dried state, made into tea. Lingzhi mushrooms, also known as Reishi, are available in tea form to support heathy sleep. Barley tea is also soothing but is not appropriate for those with Celiac Disease as it contains gluten.
If, in spite of your best efforts to transition to a regular sleep schedule, you are still not sleeping well, you may want to consider acupuncture treatment for insomnia. Acupuncture, famous for its effect on pain, has also been used for at least 2,000 years to treat sleep difficulties. This modality for supporting healthful rest is becoming more popular here in the west as people try to avoid using prescription or over the counter sleep aids.
In TCM, there are several patterns of insomnia and they are identified by collecting your particular information about problems falling asleep, staying asleep, waking too early and/or not refreshed, or experiencing excessive dreams or nightmares. Because each person has their own unique history and presentation of insomnia, the acupuncture points used will vary somewhat between patients. While it would seem logical that acupuncture points for insomnia would be on or near the head, there are some that are located on the body and limbs. Examples of some commonly used acupuncture points for insomnia are Yin Tang and An Mian, which are located on the head. Shen Men is found near the wrists and San Yin Jiao is on the inner leg above the ankle bone.
Sometimes the underlying reason for poor sleep may be a pain condition or a digestive issue. It is important to identify and correct these core imbalances to bring relief to the sleep deprived. Again, acupuncture can play a significant role in this area.
To help you manage your sleep as you transition into autumn, please request your appointment with our registered acupuncturist Barbara Adach, R.Ac. by contacting The Pacific Wellness Institute at 416-929-6958 or submit your online appointment request.
Original article and pictures take www.pacificwellness.ca site
