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Hormone Regulation Therapy

By Sara Calabro

HRT is hormone replacement therapy. Acupuncture is hormone regulation therapy—which, in light of last week’s health headlines, is clearly a better option for treating menopause symptoms.

Big news came out of the U.K., where a large study of over one million postmenopausal women took place. The findings, reported on Friday, show that women who took HRT in the early stages of menopause were at higher risk of developing breast cancer than those who took it five or more years after menopause began.

This is a big deal because popular belief was that younger women who began HRT earlier into menopause had little risk of developing side effects. In other words, the women who were thought to be at the lowest risk were found to be at the highest. Keep reading

Think Twice Before IBS Antibiotic

By Sara Calabro

What does irritable bowel syndrome have in common with ear infections and sore throats? All three now represent tempting opportunities for doctors to unnecessarily—and often dangerously—put people on antibiotics.

New research, published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, shows that a two-week course of antibiotics helped IBS symptoms in 41 percent of patients. Although the findings are neither impressive (30 percent got better with placebo), comprehensive (patients with constipation were not included), nor unbiased (the studies were sponsored by Salix Pharmaceuticals, the drug’s maker), they provide doctors, finally, with something to offer patients.

IBS has proven especially tough for mainstream medicine to gets its arms around. Stress is known to play a significant role, leading many doctors to prescribe anxiety or depression drugs, but a clear physiological explanation remains elusive within biomedical parameters.

Acupuncture, because it considers the interdependent relationships of anatomical structures and how they’re affected by emotional and environmental factors, is a more sensible approach than medication for IBS. Keep reading

Seasonal Affective Not a Disorder

By Sara Calabro

Holidays, whether fun or stressful, are nothing if not distracting. With them now past, people may notice the return of emotional symptoms that surfaced just before the holiday season began. The biomedical community calls this SAD, or seasonal affective disorder, a condition that describes mood shifts associated with changing seasons.

Acupuncturists call it normal. Keep reading

The Deal with Acupuncture for Weight Loss

By Sara Calabro

From diets and support groups to surgically implanted devices, weight-loss solutions abound—and yet consistently leave something to be desired.

For every Weight Watchers success story there’s a case of backfire, in which Points counting becomes so tedious and joyless that it only increases cravings for off-the-charts foods. The same Lap-Band that improves portion control in one person may be nothing but an ineffective and unnecessary surgical procedure for another.

Different weight-loss methods produce unpredictable outcomes because we all gain weight, and struggle to lose it, for different reasons.

Acupuncture by nature is multi-pronged in its approach—it simultaneously addresses physiological and emotional imbalances—making it an especially suitable therapy for complex conditions that are difficult to isolate.

And so, The $64,000 Question: Can acupuncture really help with weight loss? Keep reading

Decoding Abdominal Pain

By Sara Calabro

The New York Times last week, in the headline to an article about enigmatic cases of abdominal pain, hailed “due diligence” as an appropriate “prescription.” Acupuncture is another.

Conditions for which standard medical tests fail to provide answers often send patients down a frustrating path. When biomedicine’s go-to diagnostic tools turn up nothing, treatment recommendations are challenging, leading to excessive testing and shot-in-the-dark prescription writing—often to no avail.

Abdominal pain frequently falls into this category and has proved an especially tough nut for biomedicine to crack. The established (yet not fully understood) brain-gut connection makes abdominal disorders harder to pin down than those that are more easily identifiable on an X-ray or blood test.

These types of conditions, ones that remain largely mysterious within biomedical paradigms, are often what lead people to acupuncture. And abdominal disorders—pain, as well as pressure and bloating, diarrhea, food intolerance, nausea and vomiting, and heartburn—are extremely common complaints in acupuncture clinics. Keep reading

Be Thankful for Acupuncture

By Sara Calabro

What do Thanksgiving and acupuncture have in common? A lot, it turns out.

At Thanksgiving, people take the time to thoughtfully prepare a complete meal. Wired recently suggested that the effort involved in Thanksgiving makes it a more pleasurable dining experience than if the turkey came from a frozen dinner and was cooked in the microwave. Likewise, acupuncture, because it requires consciousness and commitment, is ultimately more rewarding than quick-fix medicines that temporarily satiate but never fully satisfy.

The Wired article discusses new research in which mice demonstrated a preference for food that they worked hard to obtain. “Actions can create preferences,” say the authors of the study, “increasing the value ascribed to commodities acquired at greater cost.”

In other words, we get more satisfaction from the things we work for. Keep reading

Help for Veterans with PTSD

By Sara Calabro

Acupuncture is an ideal remedy for what a recent CNN article calls a “cookie-cutter” approach to addressing the hidden wounds experienced by many veterans and active military personnel.

The military, in light of the prevalence of traumatic brain injuries (TBI) among soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been criticized for its handling of non-physical war injuries.

Reportedly, physically wounded soldiers are offered expedient medical care that includes thorough rehabilitation, while those with less visible symptoms—depression, memory loss, panic attacks, and poor concentration, among others—are often left in the lurch.

Acupuncture, because it excels at addressing these more ambiguous, multi-faceted conditions, has a rightful place in the treatment of PTSD in veterans. Keep reading