When I use MRT blood test for food sensitivity testing sometimes it can be non-food items that are causing symptoms. If the patient does not experience significant improvement in health after the first week of the MRT/LEAP diet then I instruct the patient to check ingredients in cosmetics, toothpaste, soap, and skin cream. It may be a hard concept to grasp, but sensitivities and allergies can be triggered via transdermal (through skin) route as one doesn’t necessarily have to ingest something to trigger an immune response. A recent interesting Japanese study demonstrates this point very well.
The lack of acupuncture coverage by insurance companies in Massachusetts at best disappointing. Very few companies actually cover acupuncture treatments. I know I save insurance companies tens of thousands each year. I have little doubt that my acupuncture colleagues in Massachusetts in total save insurance companies many millions. We would save insurance companies more money if we weren’t a last resort.
How could I be so sure we are saving so much? One metric is simply based on people telling me they need surgery. Back, knee, intestinal, hip etc. Many times after a series of acupuncture treatments people feel remarkably better. If they underwent surgery those procedure are often at minimum $15,000 per procedure. ( typically much more). If people came to us before getting an expensive MRI the cost effectiveness would be even further realized.
Many people are not interested in taking medications with side effects. It seems more and more people are waking up to the fact that mediation for chronic conditions only treats symptoms and does little to help the underlying issue. Acupuncture is one of many great modalities that can help correct chronic conditions that Western medicine where western medicine has little answers except medication or surgery. Those answers can be very costly.
Acupunct Med. 2012 Dec;30(4):273-85. A systematic review of cost-effectiveness analyses alongside randomised controlled trials of acupuncture.
Kim SY, Lee H, Chae Y, Park HJ, Lee H. Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To summarise the evidence on the cost-effectiveness of acupuncture.
Of course a small percentage of pregnancies require modern medical intervention in the forms of medications and potential surgeries. Modern medicine has saved countless pregnant women and newborn lives. But I don’t agree with the unnecessary overuse of strong medicines or procedures that have little clinical evidence of safety and potential deleterious side effects when safer options are available. Read the rest of this entry
There can be many reasons why someone is not sleeping well. The typical patterns I see when someone complains of a not sleeping well or ‘insomnia’ is either:
A person cannot fall asleep. Either their head is spinning with thoughts (“monkey mind” 心猿) or they just feel wired and jittery.
A person wakes up after a few hours of sleep. Often around 2 am for about 1-2 hours.
A person wakes up early in the morning feeling they haven’t had enough sleep, but cannot fall back asleep. (even though it is 4:00am).
Some sleep issues can stem from endocrine system and blood sugar dysregulation. Some can be caused by anemia. Some may stem from circumstantial life situations one is currently experiencing and causing a ‘Heart’ disturbance. Certainly the sleep disorder is not from an Ambien deficiency.
Here we have a meta analysis that looked at raw data from over 2 dozen studies and it showed that acupuncture is an effective treatment for back pain. However the anti-alternative medicine folks are quick to pounce on the fact that real acupuncture over sham acupuncture only had about a 10% improvement in chronic pain scores. In other words it wasn’t statistically significant. The 5 senses only folks then claim acupuncture is just a placebo effect, which is a ridiculous argument in of itself for a few reasons:
The sham group in this case is not ‘sham’, as in receiving no treatment. “Sham” absolutely can trigger a physiological response. As any acupuncturists will tell you the mere puncturing of the skin in needles at random points can bring about positive change in some. Yes you don’t need to hit exact points in some people as they may respond to almost anything.
Of course there is a ‘placebo’ effect in acupuncture treatments. How can there not be? The patient/practitioner relationship plays a significant role as shown by Ted Kaptchuk. But what is the ‘placebo effect’? It is the mind bringing about a healing response. If the goal is to make people feel better than that is a treatment! Who cares how one gets there as long as they feel better.
Besides acupuncture one of the big components of my practice is food hypersensitivities which can cause a myriad of symptoms that then drive up our health care costs because doctors are treating the symptoms with medication rather than the identifying the cause. Food hypersensitivities are caused by immune system dysregulation where there is an inappropriate response to foods we eat that then in turn cause an inflammatory response. This inflammatory response is the root of almost all modern diseases and ‘syndromes’.
There is unequivocal evidence that the genetically modified foods that are in our food supply are contributing to the increase in inflammatory diseases we see today. This is especially true of intestinal diseases, asthma, allergies, and likely contributes in some way to the autism spectrum of diseases. I will go out on a stretch and say I wouldn’t be surprised that in 10 or 15 years we find that all these new tick vector diseases and widespread insect diseases are in part because of the GMO crops that lay out in fields for animals,birds and insects to eat causing mutant genes to be expressed.
Jeffrey Smith the direction of the Institute for Responsible Technology has made a stellar film about GMOs. It is available free for the next week. Please take an hour to view it. GMOs in our food supply must be stopped.
There was an insightful interview on NPR’s “Here and Now” regarding the corruption within the USDA organic standards. Before the government took over labeling of the organic standards there was no big business involved. It was only small farmers who held the spirit of the organic food movement. Some states had their own labeling. But now that the USDA is involved and big box stores are selling organics, not because they believe organic food is good for you, but in the name of profit, the ‘organic’ standard has become green washed.
In a meta-analysis, oral doses of at least 800 IU were associated with
reductions in the risk of both hip and nonvertebral fractures, according
to Heike Bischoff-Ferrari, MD, DrPH, of University Hospital in Zurich,
and colleagues.
The analysis differs from previous studies and other meta-analyses in
that it looked at how much vitamin D participants actually took, rather
than what dose they were assigned to take, Bischoff-Ferrari and
colleagues reported in the July 5 issue of the New England Journal of
Medicine.
Ivan Oransky, executive editor of Reuters Health, delivered a clever TEDMED 2012 talk on pre-disease states. He sums up one of the main problems with our healthcare system – the over-treatment of potentially non-medical conditions that offer little return on investment. Here is Dr Oransky’s blog.
My wife, Joy, and I work with many prenatal women. We certainly honor the birthing choices our clients would like however we also try to educate regarding options. Many people. including us feel the C-Section rate (over 33% in the Boston area) is a bit out of control.
C-Sections are absolutely necessary. C-sections have saved tens of thousands of lives, both baby and mother. However 1 out of every 3 births do not require a C-Section as is shown by the lower C-Section rates of Toby Hospital in Wareham and the Mt Auburn Midwives. An emergency procedure has turned into almost a standard of care because of many factors.Read the rest of this entry
When I use MRT blood test for food sensitivity testing sometimes it can be non-food items that are causing symptoms. If the patient does not experience significant improvement in health after the first week of the MRT/LEAP diet then I instruct the patient to check ingredients in cosmetics, toothpaste, soap, and skin cream. It may be a hard concept to grasp, but sensitivities and allergies can be triggered via transdermal (through skin) route as one doesn’t necessarily have to ingest something to trigger an immune response. A recent interesting Japanese study demonstrates this point very well. 
Besides acupuncture one of the big components of my practice is 
High doses of vitamin D prevent fractures in older people – as long as