More Over-Radiated Cancer Patients
February 26, 2010
The New York Times
By Walt Bogdanich and Rebecca R. Ruiz
A hospital in Missouri said Wednesday that it had overradiated 76 patients, the vast majority with brain cancer, during a five-year period because powerful new radiation equipment had been set up incorrectly even with a representative of the manufacturer watching as it was done.
The hospital, CoxHealth in Springfield, said half of all patients undergoing a particular type of treatment — stereotactic radiation therapy — were overdosed by about 50 percent after an unidentified medical physicist at the hospital miscalibrated the new equipment and routine checks over the next five years failed to catch the error.
The revelation comes at a time of growing concern about safety procedures for a new generation of powerful, computer-controlled medical radiation equipment.
Stereotactic therapy delivers radiation in such high doses that usually only one treatment is required. It is commonly used to treat small tumors in the head, which must be firmly stabilized, allowing radiation to be delivered to a precise location.
The error was discovered in September 2009 only after a second physicist received training on the equipment, made by BrainLAB, and the hospital began questioning whether the machine had been installed correctly in 2004, in a process called commissioning.
The overdoses at CoxHealth occurred in a state where there is little or no government oversight of radiation therapy, a fact that Robert H. Bezanson, the hospital’s president and chief executive, chose to emphasize.
On Wednesday, he released a letter that he wrote to the Food and Drug Administration, saying that its recent decision to toughen oversight of diagnostic radiation did not go far enough.
“The initiative should be broadened to include regulation of medical radiation therapy as well,” he wrote. “We have also learned that the incident here at CoxHealth is, unfortunately, not an isolated occurrence. Rather, similar instances of medical overradiation have occurred at other hospitals throughout the country. Without increased regulation and oversight, these instances of medical overradiation will likely continue.”
The hospital promised to work with state legislators on ways to better regulate radiation therapy.
Last month, The New York Times documented the harm that can result from radiation errors when basic safety rules are not followed. It also found that in a variety of ways, the pace of technology had outpaced the ability of the medical profession and regulators to keep up.
The overdoses in Springfield echoed what occurred at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., where a similar commissioning error resulted in 77 brain cancer patients’ receiving 50 percent more radiation than prescribed in 2004 and 2005. The failure of medical facilities to properly commission new radiological equipment was cited as a concern last November by the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.
A testing service for institutions participating in National Cancer Institute trials recommends that certain newly installed radiotherapy equipment undergo an external, independent review before patients are treated. That did not occur at either Moffitt or CoxHealth.
CoxHealth said that so far it had not found any patients who had been harmed beyond the complications of routine radiation therapy. But patients are still being contacted. Some patients, who were seriously ill, have died, and the hospital is looking into those cases.
“The review of their charts and situation is still ongoing,” said Dr. John Duff, senior vice president for hospital operations. “It would be premature to speculate whether the overexposure was a contributing factor to their death.”
Dr. Duff said he did not know why the BrainLAB employee who was present while the new equipment was being installed had not caught the mistake. He said that the hospital did not have any reports from BrainLAB indicating a problem.
The physicist who incorrectly installed the equipment no longer works at the hospital. Officials there declined to explain the circumstances of his departure.
“It’s unacceptable to us that an error like this occurred, and we are taking steps to make sure that an error like this doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Bezanson said.
The hospital said its stereotactic system “remains suspended indefinitely while we are auditing the entire program.”
Kate Franco, a spokeswoman for BrainLAB, issued a statement Wednesday that said the company had assisted CoxHealth in figuring out what went wrong. “Reviews determined that BrainLAB equipment performed as designed and did not malfunction,” the statement said.
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Scientists Warn of Fraud of Stem Cell ‘Banks’
Febraury 22, 2010
BreitBart
Clinics that offer to “bank” stem cells from the umbilical cords of newborns for use later in life when illness strikes are fraudsters, a top US scientist said.
Clinics in many countries allow parents to deposit stem cells from their neonate’s umbilical cord with a view to using the cells to cure major illnesses that could occur later in life.
In Thailand, for example, parents pay in the region of 3,600 dollars to make a deposit in a stem cell bank, thinking they are taking out a sort of health insurance for their child.
But Irving Weissman, director of the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University in California, said the well-meaning parents were being fleeced by the stem cell bankers.
“Umbilical cords contain blood-forming stem cells at a level that would maintain the blood-forming capacity of a very young child,” Weissman told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
“They could also have derived mesenchymal cells — fiberglass-like cells that have a very limited capacity to make scar, bone, fat — but they don’t make brain, they don’t make blood, they don’t make heart, they don’t make skeletal muscle, despite what various people claim,” he said.
Weissman said these “unproven stem cell therapeutic clinicians” tend to set up shop in countries with poor medical regulations, but AFP found websites for umbilical cord stem cell banks in European Union member states and in the United States.
“They do the therapies, then they let the patients go on their own, short of maybe 50-150,000 dollars for a therapy that has no chance — taken away from a family that needs them when they have an incurable disease,” Weissman said.
“It is wrong.”
The International Stem Cell Society is due to issue a report in April about unproven stem cell therapies such as banking a baby’s umbilical cord blood for future use.
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Treating Brain Injuries with Amino Acids
February 22, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
Researchers from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia have found in a lab study that amino acids are highly effective at restoring cognitive function and balancing neurochemical levels in those who have undergone brain trauma. Conducted on mice who had been inflicted with traumatic brain damage, the study holds promising potential for humans with similar injuries.
The study appeared in the online journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In it, researchers fed brain-injured mice leucine, isoleucine, and valine, three branched chain amino acids (BCAAs) that have been shown to heal severe brain injuries. The result was that the brain-injured mice demonstrated a full cognitive recovery, visibly responding the same as uninjured mice following their treatment.
The BCAAs used in the study are the precursors to two important neurotransmitters, glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) which jointly balance proper brain activity. Damage to the hippocampus, the portion of the brain that sustains memory and higher learning, is typical during a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and results in reduced BCAA levels. Supplementation with BCAAs has proven to rejuvenate the brain and restore it to normal function.
Intravenous nourishment with BCAAs has been done before, however in this study the BCAA mixture was added to the mice’s drinking water. Dr. Akiva Cohen, Ph.D. and author of the study, recommends dietary supplementation with BCAAs for human TBI treatment. He believes oral rather than intravenous supplementation is preferable because, rather than flood the brain with too high a dose intravenously, drinking BCAAs will provide a more sustained dose with increased benefits.
Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
This is interesting research because it shows how dietary supplements can give the brain the raw materials it needs to heal itself. The fact that this process exists at all is considered utterly impossible by the FDA, which maintains the ridiculous position that there is no such thing as a nutritional supplement that has any therapeutic effect on the human body whatsoever.
If BCAAs actually worked, the FDA says, they would be “drugs” instead of supplements. And they would be regulated and available only by prescription. The FDA cannot tolerate the existence of a nutritional supplement that actually works to accelerate healing while being freely available to anyone who wants to buy it.
Reality, however, stands in contrast to the FDA. In the real world, nutrients do help the brain heal. In the real world, food is medicine. The FDA, to its own embarrassment, continues to deny this simple fact of human physiology.
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Hopes Rise in Fight Against Aids
February 22, 2010
The Independant
By Steve Connor
Testing everyone at risk of HIV and treating them with anti-retroviral drugs could eradicate the global epidemic within 40 years, according to the scientist at the centre of a radical new approach to fighting Aids.
An aggressive programme of prescribing anti-retroviral treatment (ART) to every person infected with HIV could stop all new infections in five years and eventually wipe out the epidemic, said Brian Williams of the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis.
Dr Williams is part of a growing body of experts who believe that anti-HIV drugs are probably the best hope of preventing and even eliminating the spread of Aids, rather than waiting for the development of an effective vaccine or relying solely on people changing their sexual lifestyle.
The idea will be tested in the coming year, with the start of the first properly controlled clinical trial involving thousands of people living in a part of South Africa with a high incidence of HIV and Aids. Dr Williams said this will be followed by similar trials in the US, where HIV is rampant among some inner-city communities.
“Our immediate best hope is to use ART not only to save lives but also to reduce transmission of HIV. I believe if we used ART drugs we could effectively stop transmission of HIV within five years,” Dr Williams said. “It may be possible to stop HIV transmission and halve Aids-related TB within 10 years and eliminate both infections within 40 years,” he told the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego, California.
Anti-retroviral drugs dramatically lower the concentration of HIV within a person’s bloodstream, and, in addition to protecting patients against Aids, they significantly lower an individual’s infectiousness – their ability to transmit the virus to another person.
Dr Williams and his supporters believe that if enough infected people are treated, it would lower the rate of infection to such an extent that the epidemic would die out within the lifetime of those undergoing the treatment. Aids could effectively be wiped out by the middle of this century, he said.
“The problem is that we are using the drugs to save lives, but we are not using them to stop transmission,” Dr Williams said. Blocking transmission can only be done with an extensive testing regime followed by rapid treatment with anti-retroviral drugs to everyone found to be HIV positive, he said.
“The concentration of the virus drops 10,000 times [with ART] … This probably translates into a 25-fold reduction in infectiousness. But if you did this it would be enough essentially to stop transmission,” he said.
A study published in 2008 showed that it is theoretically possible to cut new HIV cases by 95 per cent, from a prevalence of 20 per 1,000 to 1 per 1,000, within 10 years of implementing a programme of universal testing and prescription of ART drugs.
“Each person with HIV infects, on average, one person every one or two years. Since people with HIV, and without treatment, live for an average of 10 years after infection, each person with HIV infects about five to 10 people,” Dr Williams said. “Treating people with ART within about one year of becoming infected would reduce transmission by about 10 times. Each person with HIV would infect, on average, less than one other person and the epidemic would die out.”
ART drugs have to be taken on a daily basis for life, and the cost for South Africa alone would be about $4bn (£2.6bn) per year. However, Dr Williams said that the cost of having to treat a growing number of Aids patients, as well as the economic cost of young adults dying off, would be higher than giving out free ART drugs to everyone who needs them.
“The key issue of cost is that if you don’t do anything it costs you a lot of money. In South Africa we spend a lot of money on people who are hospitalised with infections related to HIV,” Dr Williams said. “More importantly, we are killing young adults in the prime of their life just when they should be contributing to society. The cost to society of that is enormous.
“If you factor all of the costs into the equation then, in my opinion, doing this is a cost saving from day one because the cost of the drugs will be more than outweighed by the costs of treating all of these people with other diseases,” he said. “A friend of mine said that the only thing that is more expensive than doing this is not doing this.”
The first full-scale clinical trial is being planned in Hlabisa in Somkhele, about 220km north of Durban. It will be designed to test whether it is possible to ensure that people who are taking ART drugs comply with the strict prescription regime of daily pill taking, as well as discovering whether transmission rates fall below the level needed to sustain the epidemic.
“One quarter of the global cases are in southern Africa and one half of these are in South Africa, so South Africa is extraordinarily badly affected,” Dr Williams said.
“We could stop transmission quickly, but it doesn’t end the problem because people are infected with HIV for life. So we really are in it for the long term. We need to do a lot of operational research before we can consider this seriously as a public-health intervention, but there is a lot of enthusiasm for it,” he added.
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FDA to Increase Oversight of Medical Radiation Scanners
February 11, 2010
The New York Times
By Walt Bogdanich and Rebecca R. Ruiz
The federal Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that it would take steps to more stringently regulate three of the most potent forms of medical radiation, including increasingly popular CT scans, some of which deliver the radiation equivalent of 400 chest X-rays.With the announcement, the F.D.A. puts its regulatory muscle behind a growing movement to make life-saving medical radiation — both diagnostic and therapeutic — safer.
Last week, the leading radiation oncology association called for enhanced safety measures. And a Congressional committee was set to hear testimony Wednesday on the weak oversight of medical radiation, but the hearing was canceled because of bad weather.
The F.D.A. has for weeks been investigating why more than 300 patients in four hospitals were overradiated by powerful CT scans used to detect strokes. The overdoses were first discovered last year at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where patients received up to eight times as much radiation as intended.
The errors occurred over 18 months and were detected only after patients lost their hair.
In making the announcement, the F.D.A. said it hoped to reduce unnecessary radiation exposure from three medical imaging procedures: CT scans, which provide three-dimensional images; nuclear medicine studies, in which patients are given a radioactive substance and doctors watch it move through the body; and fluoroscopies, in which a radiation-emitting device provides a continuous internal image on a monitor.
“These types of imaging exams expose patients to ionizing radiation, a type of radiation that can increase a person’s lifetime cancer risk,” the F.D.A. said. “Accidental exposure to very high amounts of radiation also can cause injuries, such as skin burns, hair loss and cataracts.”
Patients today receive far more radiation than ever before. The average lifetime dose of diagnostic radiation — excluding therapeutic radiation — has increased sevenfold since 1980, prompting widespread concerns that certain procedures are overused and that they needlessly expose patients to an increased risk of cancer. Children and women are particularly vulnerable.
Last month, The New York Times documented the harm that can result when complex machines that generate radiation are programmed incorrectly and when basic safety procedures are not followed. The Times also found that a patchwork of laws and regulations to protect patients are weak or unevenly applied.
The F.D.A. has long had jurisdiction over medical devices, but it has made limited use of its power. Consumer groups, for example, have repeatedly contended that the agency allows manufacturers to sell new devices without first having to prove their safety and efficacy.
In its announcement, the agency said it might require manufacturers of CT scanners and fluoroscopic devices to incorporate new safeguards into the design of their machines and to provide better training to medical personnel. The agency said it plans to hold a public meeting on March 30 and 31, “to solicit input on what requirements to establish.”
Among the proposals under consideration: that devices display, record and report equipment settings and radiation dose; that an alert be issued when the radiation dose exceeds an optimal dose for most patients; and that devices be required to capture and transmit radiation dose information to a patient’s electronic medical record and to national dose registries.
The F.D.A. said it would also work with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to incorporate new safety practices into the accreditation process of imaging facilities and hospitals.
“I think it is very timely in light of concerns about radiation exposure and the possibility of overexposure,” said Dr. James Thrall, professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and chairman of the American College of Radiology. “I think it will nudge the industry.”
A major issue, Dr. Thrall said, is that “there is nothing on the machine that tells the technologist that they’ve dialed in a badly incorrect radiation exposure.”
Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said manufacturers were generally supportive of the agency’s proposal. “We are using a variety of tools available to us — both regulatory in nature and collaborative in nature — to maximize benefits,” Dr. Shuren said.
The Medical Imaging and Technology Alliance, an association of manufacturers of radiological equipment, issued a statement supporting the F.D.A. initiative, while calling for mandatory accreditation of advanced imaging facilities and for establishing minimum standards for personnel who perform medical imaging exams and deliver radiation therapy treatments.
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Genes Linked to Stuttering Identified
February 11th, 2010
ABC News
By Joseph Brownstein
When she was a girl, Jane Fraser recalls her father, Malcolm, asking her to give their name when they checked into a hotel.
Malcolm Fraser was one of the founders of the Genuine Parts Company, which is now part of NAPA Auto Parts. But this successful man was also a stutterer.
“It’s all over my family, and a lot of us stuttered as children but got therapy early on,” said Jane Fraser, noting that she received speech therapy because of the suspicion at the time that stuttering runs in families. For her, the therapy may have spared her from the condition.
“None of my generation or their children or their grandchildren have that problem,” she said.
On Wednesday, researchers confirmed what some have long suspected by finding genes that account for some cases of stuttering, a condition that affects about 3 million Americans.
It is a development that Fraser and others believe will allow better recognition of the condition and more early intervention and be the first step toward resolving an ailment that affects many worldwide.
“I think one of the most exciting things [about the finding] is that people who stutter have to spend their lives telling people it is not psychological, it is not emotional,” said Fraser, who is now president of the Stuttering Foundation of America, an organization founded by her father.
This study, she said, “takes that burden off of people of having to explain what it is.
“Every day, we hear from hundreds of parents who call us, and their first question is, ‘Did I cause my child’s stuttering?’” she said. “Knowing there is a biological base at least relieves that person of guilt.”
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Sunbathing Boosting Testosterone in Men
February 5, 2010
BBC News
The bulk of this essential nutrient is made by the skin on exposure to sunlight. The rest comes from the diet.
A study in Clinical Endocrinology journal of 2,299 men found those with enough of the vitamin had more of the male sex hormone than those with less.
Blood levels of both dipped in the winter and peaked in the summer.
Low testosterone levels can impact on a man’s libido as well as zap energy levels.
It also performs essential functions in both men and women such as maintaining muscle strength and bone density.The researchers from the Medical University of Graz, Austria, found men with at least 30 nanograms of vitamin D per millilitre of blood had much more testosterone circulating than those lacking in vitamin D.
Across the 2,299 men studied, testosterone and vitamin D levels appeared to peak in the month of August, and drop off in the winter, hitting their lowest levels in March.
Professor Winfried Marz and colleagues, who ran the study, said scientists should now look at whether vitamin D supplements would have the same effect on testosterone.
Ad Brand of the Sunlight Research Forum in The Netherlands, a non-profit organisation set up to inform the general public on latest medical research on sun and health, said: “Men who ensure that their body is at least sufficiently supplied with vitamin D are doing good for their testosterone levels and their libido among other things.”
Cancer experts warn that too much sun exposure is damaging for the health.
Allan Pacey, senior lecturer in Andrology at the University of Sheffield, said: “We know that medically we can increase the libido and general well-being of men who have low levels of testosterone by giving them testosterone replacement therapy.
“However, this is for a defined set of medical circumstances where testosterone production is low.
“Whether healthy men notice a significant changes throughout the year is less clear and I would urge men to be sensible about using sunbeds in the winter months given the known risks of using them excessively.”
Jessica Harris of Cancer Research UK said: “Enjoying the sun safely while taking care not to burn should help people strike a balance between making enough vitamin D and avoiding a higher risk of skin cancer.
“People can also top up their levels of vitamin D by eating more foods like oily fish such as salmon, trout or mackerel.”
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Asthma Worsens With Vitamin D Deficiency
February 1, 2010
Business Week
By Steven Reinberg
People with asthma who have low levels of vitamin D fare worse than those with high levels of the “sunshine” vitamin, a new study finds.
Researchers found that asthmatics with high vitamin D levels have better lung function and respond better to treatment than asthmatics with low vitamin D levels do.
“Our findings suggest that low vitamin D levels are associated with worse asthma,” said lead researcher Dr. E. Rand Sutherland, from the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at National Jewish Health in Denver.
In addition, vitamin D levels predict how well “somebody is going to respond to steroidal asthma medications,” he said. “It may be that vitamin D is acting as a modifier of the immune system or a modifier of steroid response in ways that are relevant to people with asthma.”
The report is published in the Jan. 28 online edition of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
For the study, Sutherland’s team took the vitamin D levels of 54 asthmatics and assessed lung function, airway hyper-responsiveness, which is the prevalence of airway constriction, and response to steroid treatment.
People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood did worse on the tests that evaluated lung function and airway hyper-responsiveness, the researchers found.
In those with vitamin levels below 30 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml), airway hyper-responsiveness almost doubled, compared to those with more D in their blood.
Low vitamin D levels were also associated with a worse response to steroid therapy and increased production of the pro-inflammatory cytokine, TNF-alpha. This raises the possibility that low vitamin D levels are tied to increased inflammation of the airways.
The heaviest participants had the lowest levels of vitamin D, the study noted. Asthma is associated with obesity, and this (lack of vitamin D) may be a factor linking the two conditions, Sutherland said.
“There is a potential that restoring normal vitamin D levels in people with asthma may help improve their asthma,” Sutherland said.
But whether vitamin D supplements will help asthmatics isn’t known, he added.
Current recommendations for vitamin D supplements for adults is 400 IU to 600 IU, depending on age, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
“There is likely little harm in adhering to those guidelines,” Sutherland said.
The Institute of Medicine is currently evaluating these levels and expects to announce new guidelines in May.
Sunlight, fatty fish and fish oils are also sources of vitamin D.
Dr. Michael F. Holick, director of the Vitamin D, Skin and Bone Research Laboratory at Boston University School of Medicine, called this “a very nice study that confirms previous observations that vitamin D enhances lung function.”
“It is also known that glucocorticoids [steroids] increase the destruction of vitamin D, thus making patients with asthma at higher risk for vitamin D deficiency, which in turn decreases lung function and makes their disease worse,” he said.
Holick thinks most people, asthmatic or not, get too little D and should take supplements.
“It’s pretty clear that you need a minimum of 1,400 and up to 2,000 IU a day, and if you are obese, you probably need at least one and a half to two times as much, because the fat sequesters the vitamin D,” Holick said. “We now recognize that you can take up to 10,000 IUs a day and not worry about any untoward toxicity.”
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Radiation Therapy Can Harm the Brain – Affecting Memory and Attention
February 1, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Radiation therapy for the treatment of brain tumors may lead to cognitive decline later in life, according to a study conducted by researchers from VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and published in The Lancet Neurology.
Scientists have known for some time that radiation therapy can damage healthy brain tissue, but prior research found no immediate negative effects from the treatment. In the new study, researchers conducted brain function tests on 65 patients who had undergone treatment for low-grade glioma 12 years previously.
Low-grade glioma is one of the most common forms of brain tumor. It is non-carcinogenic, and can often be removed with surgery. However, many doctors use radiotherapy following surgery.
The researchers found that a full 53 percent of patients who had been treated with radiation exhibited problems with mental function 12 years after their treatment, compared with only 27 percent of those who had not undergone radiation treatment. Radiotherapy patients were especially likely to have problems with memory and attention.
Because the average patient survives a full decade after being diagnosed with low-grade glioma, the researchers noted that large numbers of patients will survive long enough to suffer the negative cognitive effects of radiotherapy. For this reason, they recommended that doctors avoid using radiation in the treatment of glioma unless absolutely necessary — such as in cases where the tumor returns after surgery, for example.
“It always depends on the patient, but if it is possible to defer radiotherapy, maybe people should,” lead researcher Linda Douw said.
Cancer research scientist Jeremy Rees of the United Kingdom’s National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery Honorary said that his hospital already avoids radiotherapy for low-grade glioma patients except when the tumor is already progressing or when the patient suffers from uncontrolled epilepsy.
“Surgery is generally a preferred option with chemotherapy or radiotherapy coming into play at a later stage, if the glioma progresses,” he said.
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Acupuncture Increases Sex Drive Decreases Hot Flashes
January 28th, 2010
Natural News
By Mike Adams
A recent study conducted by Henry Ford Hospital in Michigan revealed that acupuncture has even more benefits than previously thought for patients with breast cancer. In addition to reducing hot flashes better than drug therapy, acupuncture is effective at boosting the sex drive and overall sense of well-being in women undergoing intensive breast cancer treatment.
Published in the Journal of Oncology, the study highlights the superiority of acupuncture in improving the quality of life for breast cancer patients without imposing negative side effects like drugs do. Dr. Eleanor Walker, lead author of the study and division director of breast services in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Henry Ford, confirmed this to be true when explaining the details of the study.
Two groups, one receiving acupuncture for their symptoms and the other receiving Venlafaxine drug therapy, were observed over a 12 week period. Initially, all the women experienced a 50 percent reduction in hot flash and night sweat symptoms. At the end of the treatment period, however, the group that received Venlafaxine experienced an immediate increase in symptoms while the acupuncture group did not.
The purpose of the study was to focus on alternative treatments to Venlafaxine that would better alleviate the negative side effects of breast cancer treatment and ultimately encourage women to continue participating in it.
According to the National Cancer Institute, 13 percent of women will develop breast cancer during their lifetime. Since conventional treatment is long and difficult, researchers hope to alleviate some of the associated misery with methods other than drug therapies that only make the situation more difficult.
Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Once again, another clinical study scientifically demonstrates the power of acupuncture to make real, measurable improvements in the health and lives of patients.
It’s no surprise, of course: Acupuncture has been used safely and effectively for over five thousand years in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and literally hundreds of clinical trials conducted over the last twenty years have shown it to be remarkably safe and effective in treating a variety of health complaints from back pain to infertility.
Acupuncture works because the body reacts to stimulation with a healing response (well, that’s only part of the reason acupuncture works, actually). A skilled acupuncture practitioner can initiate a healing response in the patient that no drug, no surgery and no medical intervention could ever accomplish.
That’s what’s really interesting about acupuncture: It doesn’t do any healing. Rather, acupuncture stimulates the body to heal itself. This idea fails to be recognized at all in conventional medicine, which continues to follow the long-outmoded belief that the doctor heals the patient and that, astonishingly, the patient has no role in his or her own healing.
Practitioners of acupuncture knew thousands of years ago what many western doctors still haven’t figure out today:
The patient is the healer. The doctor is merely an initiator of the patient’s own self-healing ability.Comments by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Once again, another clinical study scientifically demonstrates the power of acupuncture to make real, measurable improvements in the health and lives of patients.
It’s no surprise, of course: Acupuncture has been used safely and effectively for over five thousand years in Traditional Chinese Medicine, and literally hundreds of clinical trials conducted over the last twenty years have shown it to be remarkably safe and effective in treating a variety of health complaints from back pain to infertility.
Acupuncture works because the body reacts to stimulation with a healing response (well, that’s only part of the reason acupuncture works, actually). A skilled acupuncture practitioner can initiate a healing response in the patient that no drug, no surgery and no medical intervention could ever accomplish.
That’s what’s really interesting about acupuncture: It doesn’t do any healing. Rather, acupuncture stimulates the body to heal itself. This idea fails to be recognized at all in conventional medicine, which continues to follow the long-outmoded belief that the doctor heals the patient and that, astonishingly, the patient has no role in his or her own healing.
Practitioners of acupuncture knew thousands of years ago what many western doctors still haven’t figure out today: The patient is the healer. The doctor is merely an initiator of the patient’s own self-healing ability.
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