A recent small pilot study (36 participants) with dry eyes demonstrated that acupuncture can increase increase tear wetting. (click here for study) In my practice I do not use acupuncture as a first line therapy for dry eyes. I look to nutrition first, as often increasing essential fatty acids, especially Omega-3 can resolve dry eyes. I usually suggest patients use flax seed oil for dry eyes. If that does not resolve the dry eyes then often individualized herbal medicine quickly brings relief.
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There are a plethora of studies showing the benefits of probiotics during second and third trimesters of pregnancy. One of the supplements I always recommend during pregnancy are probiotics.   Research has shown they are particularly important in the latter stages of pregnancy. Read the rest of this entry

A recent study published in this month’s Journal of Pain demonstrated that acupuncture has a much more favorable outcome for carpal tunnel syndrome after 1 year of treatment compared to steroids.

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There is a study making headlines today that we do not need more than 600IU of vitamin D per day. You probably have seen the headlines. What is ridiculous is that this study only looked at bone health as a marker and ignored the thousands of other metabolic functions that vitamin D plays. Ignore the headlines – take your vitamin D and get it measured properly!

I’ll let the experts reply to this article, but I cut and pasted below a response to this study from the Vitamin D Council.

(Do get your vitamin D levels checked, but when you do make sure you do not take any in supplementation form for at least 2-3 days prior to the blood draw. Also it is the 25(OH)D level that is important although in some people the ratio of D2:D3 may be important such as some autoimmune diseases)

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After 13 year of silence, the quasi governmental agency, the Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) Food and Nutrition Board (FNB), today recommended that a three-pound premature infant take virtually the same amount of vitamin D as a 300 pound pregnant woman. While that 400 IU/day dose is close to adequate for infants, 600 IU/day in pregnant women will do nothing to help the three childhood epidemics most closely associated with gestational and early childhood vitamin D deficiencies: asthma, auto-immune disorders, and, as recently reported in the largest pediatric journal in the world, autism. Professor Bruce Hollis of the Medical University of South Carolina has shown pregnant and lactating women need at least 5,000 IU/day, not 600.

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