It’s no secret that alcohol consumption can cause major health problems, including cirrhosis of the liver and injuries sustained in automobile accidents. But if you think liver disease and car crashes are the only health risks posed by drinking, think again: Researchers have linked alcohol consumption to more than 60 diseases.

“Alcohol does all kinds of things in the body, and we’re not fully aware of all its effects,” says James C. Garbutt, MD, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and a researcher at the university’s Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies. “It’s a pretty complicated little molecule.”

Here are 12 conditions linked to chronic heavy drinking.

Anemia

Heavy drinking can cause the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells to be abnormally low. This condition, known as anemia, can trigger a host of symptoms, including fatigue, shortness of breath, and lightheadedness.

Cancer

“Habitual drinking increases the risk of cancer,” says Jurgen Rehm, PhD, chairman of the University of Toronto’s department of addiction policy and a senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, also in Toronto. Scientists believe the increased risk comes when the body converts alcohol into acetaldehyde, a potent carcinogen. Cancer sites linked to alcohol use include the mouth, pharynx (throat), larynx (voice box), esophagus, liver, breast, and colorectal region. Cancer risk rises even higher in heavy drinkers who also use tobacco.

Cardiovascular disease

Heavy drinking, especially bingeing, makes platelets more likely to clump together into blood clots, which can lead to heart attack or stroke. In a landmark study published in 2005, Harvard researchers found that binge drinking doubled the risk of death among people who initially survived a heart attack.

Heavy drinking can also cause cardiomyopathy, a potentially deadly condition in which the heart muscle weakens and eventually fails, as well as the heart rhythm abnormalities atrial and ventricular fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation, in which the heart’s upper chambers (atria) twitch chaotically rather than constrict rhythmically, can cause blood clots that can trigger a stroke. Ventricular fibrillation causes chaotic twitching in the heart’s main pumping chambers (ventricles). It causes rapid loss of consciousness and, in the absence of immediate treatment, sudden death.

Cirrhosis

Alcohol is toxic to liver cells, and many heavy drinkers develop cirrhosis, a sometimes-lethal condition in which the liver is so heavily scarred that it is unable to function. But it’s hard to predict which drinkers will develop cirrhosis. “Some people who drink huge amounts never get cirrhosis, and some who don’t drink very much do get it,” Saitz says. For some unknown reason, women seem to be especially vulnerable.

Dementia

As people age, their brains shrink, on average, at a rate of about 1.9% per decade. That’s considered normal. But heavy drinking speeds the shrinkage of certain key regions in the brain, resulting in memory loss and other symptoms of dementia.

Heavy drinking can also lead to subtle but potentially debilitating deficits in the ability to plain, make judgments, solve problems, and other aspects of “executive function,” which are “the higher-order abilities that allow us to maximize our function as human beings,” Garbutt says.

In addition to the “nonspecific” dementia that stems from brain atrophy, heavy drinking can cause nutritional deficiencies so severe that they trigger other forms of dementia.

Depression

It’s long been known that heavy drinking often goes hand in hand with depression, but there has been debate about which came first — the drinking or the depression. One theory is that depressed people turned to alcohol in an attempt to “self-medicate” to ease their emotional pain. But earlier this year, a large study from New Zealand showed that it was probably the other way around — that is, heavy drinking led to depression.

Research has also shown that depression goes away when heavy drinkers go on the wagon, Saitz says.

Seizures

Heavy drinking can cause epilepsy and can trigger seizures even in people who don’t have epilepsy. It can also interfere with the action of the medications used to treat the disorder.

Gout

A painful condition, gout is caused by the formation of uric acid crystals in the joints. Although some cases are largely hereditary, alcohol and other dietary factors seem to play a role. Alcohol also seems to aggravate existing cases of gout.

High blood pressure

Alcohol can disrupt the sympathetic nervous system, which, among other things, controls the constriction and dilation of blood vessels in response to stress, temperature, exertion, etc. Heavy drinking — and bingeing, in particular — can cause blood pressure to rise. Over time, this effect can become chronic. High blood pressure can lead to many other health problems, including kidney disease, heart disease, and stroke.

Infectious disease

Heavy drinking suppresses the immune system, providing a toehold for infections, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted diseases (including some that cause infertility). People who drink heavily also are more likely to engage in risky sex. “Heavy drinking is associated with a three-fold increase in the risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease,” Rehmn says.

Nerve damage

Heavy drinking can cause a form of nerve damage known as alcoholic neuropathy, which can produce a painful pins-and-needles feeling in the extremities, as well as muscle weakness, incontinence, constipation, erectile dysfunction, and other problems. Alcoholic neuropathy may arise because alcohol is toxic to nerve cells, or because nutritional deficiencies attributable to heavy drinking compromise nerve function.

Pancreatitis

In addition to causing stomach irritation (gastritis), drinking can inflame the pancreas. Chronic pancreatitis interferes with the digestive process, causing abdominal pain and persistent diarrhea –and “it’s not fixable,” Saitz says. Some cases of chronic pancreatitis are triggered by gallstones, but up to 60% stem from alcohol consumption.

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Stay away from undertrained medical acupuncturists if you don’t want your lungs punctured.

Acupuncture is one of the most popular complementary therapies in the world and it’s crucial to go to a licensed acupuncturist (L.Ac.) to avoid serious complications while avoiding medical doctors, chiropractors, and other practitioners with minimal acupuncture training calling themselves acupuncturists.

According to MEDLINE, the Department of International Health Development described the pathological findings of an autopsy case of bilateral tension pneumothorax after a medical acupuncture treatment. The most serious complications of acupuncture treatment is pneumothorax due to perforation of the lungs by needle insertion. This patient suffered dyspnea and chest pain soon after the medical acupuncture treatment, and died 90 min later.
PMID: 14568778 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

The University of Muenster in Germany claims many cases of acupuncture related pneumothorax have been published over the years. They mentioned one case in particular which was a woman who received acupuncture at the level of the spinous process of the third thoracic vertebra. She experienced difficulties in breathing and pain in the left chest. On x-ray examination a tension pneumothorax was diagnosed. What made it also shocking was that this woman received acupuncture from a “fully trained medical acupuncturist”.
(PMID: 15077937 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE])

The Institute of Community Medicine in Norway reported a total of 193 patients with adverse effects of acupuncture in 14 years. Pneumothorax being the most common. Medical Acupuncture treatment is claimed to be responsible in the death of three patients.

The study confirms that serious adverse effects, however, are few, and acupuncture can generally be considered a safe treatment and that “most adverse effects of acupuncture seem to rely on inadequate acupuncture education“.
PMID: 9395661 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

So how do you find a fully educated acupuncturist and avoid an acupuncturist with “inadequate acupuncture education” and lessen your risk of serious complications?

Just follow these common sense steps:

1. Ask your acupuncturist how many hours of acupuncture study they had?
The answer should be at least 2,000 hours.

2. Ask what acupuncture school they went to.
Accredited acupuncture schools can be found here and if theirs is not on this list, walk away!

3. Beware of medical doctors, chiropractors, and other practitioners who claim to be medical acupuncturists. Most often they only have 200 hours of acupuncture education.

As a rule of thumb, be cautious of anyone who practices acupuncture secondary to their advertised expertise.

A medical doctor or other practitioner who also practices acupuncture is OK as long as they meet the criteria of #1 and #2

To find a fully trained and licensed acupuncturist you can search this acupuncture directory.

Acupuncture has been used in East-Asian medicine for thousands of years to treat pain, possibly by activating the body’s natural painkillers. But how it works at the cellular level is largely unknown.

Using brain imaging, a University of Michigan study is the first to provide evidence that traditional Chinese acupuncture affects the brain’s long-term ability to regulate pain. The results appear online ahead of publication in the September issue of Journal of NeuroImage.

In the study, researchers at the U-M Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center showed acupuncture increased the binding availability of mu-opoid receptors (MOR) in regions of the brain that process and dampen pain signals – specifically the cingulate, insula, caudate, thalamus and amygdala.

Opioid painkillers, such as morphine, codeine and other medications, are thought to work by binding to these opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord.

“The increased binding availability of these receptors was associated with reductions in pain,” says Richard E. Harris, Ph.D., researcher at the U-M Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center and a research assistant professor of anesthesiology at the U-M Medical School.

One implication of this research is that patients with chronic pain treated with acupuncture might be more responsive to opioid medications since the receptors seem to have more binding availability, Harris says.

These findings could spur a new direction in the field of acupuncture research following recent controversy over large studies showing that sham acupuncture is as effective as real acupuncture in reducing chronic pain.

“Interestingly both acupuncture and sham acupuncture groups had similar reductions in clinical pain,” Harris says. “But the mechanisms leading to pain relief are distinctly different.”

The study participants included 20 women who had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, for at least a year, and experienced pain at least 50 percent of the time. During the study they agreed not to take any new medications for their fibromyalgia pain.

Patients had position emission tomography, or PET, scans of the brain during the first treatment and then repeated a month later after the eighth treatment.

Reference: Journal of NeuroImage, Volume 47, Issue 3, September 2009, Pages 1077-1085 doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.05.083

Feeling desperate, I decided to explore an alternative to the standard medical and supplement-aisle solutions: acupuncture from a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine.

TCM theory dictates that the body’s energy, or qi, circulates through 12 meridians, which are linked to internal organs and emotions (see chart below). The heart meridian, for instance, relates to anxiety, the liver meridian to stress and anger, the spleen meridian to worry. Too much of any emotion can affect its correlating meridian, creating a disturbance in shen. “Shen is the energy of our emotional body,” explains Claudette Baker, L.Ac., president emeritus of the American Association of Oriental Medicine. “If it is affected by work or stress, it can keep us from falling asleep, prevent REM sleep, and cause us to wake easily.”

As I set out to restore my shen, I met Weidong Lu, L.Ac., a senior faculty member at the New England School of Acupuncture in Watertown, Massachusetts. During our appointment, he checked my tongue (“slightly filmy,” he said) and my pulse (“too fast!”), and asked me about work, my personal life, and the details of my sleep troubles. When I told him I was waking at 3 a.m., he noted that this is when qi peaks in the liver meridian. Along with what he knew of my life, this, said Lu, was a clue that my imbalance originated in my liver meridian.

“Your job-deadlines, running around, lots of unexpected outcomes — that sort of thing can result in constant emotional stress and a hyperactive shen.” It’s true, I often found myself forming to-do lists as I woke. Of course, at 3 a.m. I couldn’t do anything about the phone call I forgot to make, but I found it upsetting nonetheless.

Lu told me he aimed to improve my body’s ability to adapt to stress. With acupuncture (which is ideal for many since it’s safe and free of side effects), a minimum of six sessions is typically needed to inspire change. “Acupuncture has a cumulative effect,” he explained. He encouraged me to forgo coffee, even on my most tired days, and suggested a diet free of stimulants, tobacco, and sugar as well, which work to deplete yin, the body’s inward, feminine energy.

During each treatment, Lu inserted thin, three-inch needles into 16 to 20 points around my body, concentrating mostly on my legs and feet, my forearms and hands, my ears, and the top of my head. “Points in the legs correlate to the liver; arms and hands to the heart; and the top of the head to the brain,” Lu said. “Needling them all together has a synergistic effect.” The needles didn’t hurt going in, but I was quite aware of them once they were in, especially when Lu rotated them to increase their effect. Once they were in place, I cooked beneath low-heat lamps meant to further stimulate the needles’ effectiveness. Remarkably, the heat worked to warm me to sleep. A midday nap is a near-miracle for me. (Now, if only I could convince Lu to come home with me, I thought.)

Slowly but surely, my symptoms decreased with each session. At first, I still woke up but started falling back asleep faster as the treatments progressed. Three weeks later, I’m waking up maybe once or twice a week, a vast improvement if not perfection. Following Lu’s suggestion, I’ve started writing out my to-do lists before I go to sleep to “release them from my mind.” Since the most significant underlying cause of my sleeplessness seems to be the one thing I’m not willing to change — that is, a job that’s fun and fulfilling and often incredibly stressful — I’m faced with a challenge. As Lu said, there’s no cure for my insomnia, but with some careful effort toward finding time for myself — a recurring difficulty — and continued acupuncture, my body can gradually find restful balance. I’m hoping.

Connecting the Dots
TCM links each of the body’s meridians to an emotion. Use the following guide to help you figure out the roots of your imbalance. For an accurate diagnosis and treatment, visit a licensed TCM acupuncturist.

Meridian: Heart
Emotions: Anxiety
Insomnia Characteristics: Waking up easily; difficulty falling asleep

Meridian: Liver
Emotions: Anger, stress, frustration
Insomnia Characteristics: Difficulty falling asleep; waking between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.

Meridian: Lungs
Emotions: Grief
Insomnia Characteristics: Waking between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m.

Meridian: Spleen
Emotions: Worry, obsessiveness.
Insomnia Characteristics: Waking at the same time every night; dream-disturbed sleep.

Text by Alyssa Giacobbe

All along I always said that if it’s in the body, there’s a reason for it, finally Western medicine it figuring that out. Check out this article.

The Appendix: Useful and in Fact Promising

livescience.com – Mon Aug 24, 10:30 am ET

The body’s appendix has long been thought of as nothing more than a worthless evolutionary artifact, good for nothing save a potentially lethal case of inflammation.

Now researchers suggest the appendix is a lot more than a useless remnant. Not only was it recently proposed to actually possess a critical function, but scientists now find it appears in nature a lot more often than before thought. And it’s possible some of this organ’s ancient uses could be recruited by physicians to help the human body fight disease more effectively.

In a way, the idea that the appendix is an organ whose time has passed has itself become a concept whose time is over.

“Maybe it’s time to correct the textbooks,” said researcher William Parker, an immunologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. “Many biology texts today still refer to the appendix as a ‘vestigial organ.’”

The vermiform appendix is a slimy dead-end sac that hangs between the small and large intestines. No less than Charles Darwin first suggested that the appendix was a vestigial organ from an ancestor that ate leaves, theorizing that it was the evolutionary remains of a larger structure, called a cecum, which once was used by now-extinct predecessors for digesting food.

“Everybody likely knows at least one person who had to get their appendix taken out – slightly more than 1 in 20 people do – and they see there are no ill effects, and this suggests that you don’t need it,” Parker said.

However, Parker and his colleagues recently suggested that the appendix still served as a vital safehouse where good bacteria could lie in wait until they were needed to repopulate the gut after a nasty case of diarrhea. Past studies had also found the appendix can help make, direct and train white blood cells.

Now, in the first investigation of the appendix over the ages, Parker explained they discovered that it has been around much longer than anyone had suspected, hinting that it plays a critical function.

“The appendix has been around for at least 80 million years, much longer than we would estimate if Darwin’s ideas about the appendix were correct,” Parker said.

Moreover, the appendix appears in nature much more often than previously acknowledged. It has evolved at least twice, once among Australian marsupials such as the wombat and another time among rats, lemmings, meadow voles, Cape dune mole-rats and other rodents, as well as humans and certain primates.

“When species are divided into groups called ‘families,’ we find that more than 70 percent of all primate and rodent groups contain species with an appendix,” Parker said.

Several living species, including several lemurs, certain rodents and the scaly-tailed flying squirrel, still have an appendix attached to a large cecum, which is used in digestion. Darwin had thought appendices appeared in only a small handful of animals.

“We’re not saying that Darwin’s idea of evolution is wrong – that would be absurd, as we’re using his ideas on evolution to do this work,” Parker told LiveScience. “It’s just that Darwin simply didn’t have the information we have now.”

He added, “If Darwin had been aware of the species that have an appendix attached to a large cecum, and if he had known about the widespread nature of the appendix, he probably would not have thought of the appendix as a vestige of evolution.”

What causes appendicitis?

Darwin was also not aware that appendicitis, or a potentially deadly inflammation of the appendix, is not due to a faulty appendix, but rather to cultural changes associated with industrialized society and improved sanitation, Parker said.

“Those changes left our immune systems with too little work and too much time their hands – a recipe for trouble,” he said. “Darwin had no way of knowing that the function of the appendix could be rendered obsolete by cultural changes that included widespread use of sewer systems and clean drinking water.”

Now that scientists are uncovering the normal function of the appendix, Parker notes a critical question to ask is whether anything can be done to prevent appendicitis. He suggests it might be possible to devise ways to incite our immune systems today in much the same manner that they were challenged back in the Stone Age.

“If modern medicine could figure out a way to do that, we would see far fewer cases of allergies, autoimmune disease, and appendicitis,” Parker said.

The scientists detailed their findings online August 12 in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

More and more studies such as the one above are showing the difficulties and dangers of balancing delicate systems like blood sugar regulation after they are injured to the point of diabetes or insulin resistance, etc. Many researchers are calling Alzheimer’s “Type III Diabetes” now . . . that should give us clues!

What we already know, and don’t say loudly enough to the general public, and certainly don’t teach our children very well, is that the best preventatives for blood sugar problems are:

1) Daily healthy exercise: preferably 30 minutes to an hour of walking or walking/jogging/running in nature, plus whatever sports, dance, working out, etc. that suits your body and energies.
2) A healthy, varied diet of whole foods (that is, foods that are recognizable without processing and packaging: an apple is an example of a ‘whole’ food, a slice of bread is highly-processed.
3) Avoiding unnecessary extra sugars in your diet, such as artificial sweeteners, corn sugars, corn syrup, corn solids (etc.), and most processed sugars. This doesn’t mean one never has dessert, but there are ways to have healthier, more delicious desserts than simply pouring on the sugary foods.

If your body is already struggling (overweight, energy surges or lows, bloating, indigestion, reflux), there are many excellent professionals, notably acupuncturist/herbalists, homeopaths, and professionals who are trained in therapeutic nutrition or Chinese nutrition therapy, who can help you to regain your health balance and a lot of vitality!

If you personally need to lose weight or you have friends, family, patients or clients that are wanting to lose some weight, but you aren’t a personal fitness expert (face it, many of us need to lose some weight too), then you need to share this with them, for their health, wellness and vitality.

Fitness pro Jon Benson released a bombshell last week on the fat-burning world.

He is giving away a book’s worth of material in his freee 7-Day Personal Fat Loss Certification Course.

Freee… and get this: Anyone who completes the course gets his book “The Radical Fatloss Blueprint” freee as well.

So there’s nothing to buy at all… in fact you get tons of freee stuff AND you can even earn bucks in the program.

It’s just too cool for words.

So go see it for yourself:

http://www.fit365online.com/friends/register.php?aff=vitality1 <— freee fatloss Course and book

Here is a short review:

The Course is for anyone who wants to become their own “personal” fatloss expert. It is complete with a quiz each day and more material than most people sell in a book… and it’s totally freee.

After the course, you get his “Radical Fatloss Blueprint” freee too. This is all about how he and a group of “guinea pigs” experimented with natural techniques and got up to 21 lbs of unwanted bodyfat off in just 21 days.

The average was 17.5, but some people got as much as 30 lbs off.

All with little to no muscle lost.

It then outlines the ‘exact’ workout and supplement “feeding” schedule Jon still uses to get into top shape in 21 days.

This is down to the ‘hour’… and it includes home workouts or gym workouts. Your choice.

This is his gift to my friends and family, and I am thrilled to share it with you.

Here you go:

http://www.fit365online.com/friends/register.php?aff=vitality1 <— freee fatloss Course and book

Enjoy the course!

It’s only 16 minutes long and covers the connection between your “hormones” and body fat.

Not only body fat… Your sexual-drive, your energy, your mood, and of course issues like menopause, andropause (male menopause) and more.

Give it a look…

www.naturapause.com/aff/vitality1/video-preview

Just by taking some of Dr. Lucille’s advice (natural, without harmful drugs) you can kick-start your hormonal system back into overdrive.

That’s the best way to end stubborn bodyfat and reboot your drive at the same time.

As someone who spent ten years inside the pharmaceutical industry, I can tell you one thing for sure: Big Pharma goes where the money is. And the money is with the ladies.

Chicks matter

Although women are certainly not the only targets of drug ads, winning the female audience is critical to the success of any given drug. Women are more proactive about their health, more likely to “talk to their doctor”, more likely to encourage their husbands to seek medical treatment (than their husband is to seek it himself), and more likely to manage the healthcare for the entire family. It is just darned good business for pharma to set their sights on the ladies. But what is good for business — explosive prescription sales of new drugs — is not necessarily good for public health.

Newer is not better, Dorothy

The vast majority of the drug ads we see are for the newest and most expensive drugs available. These drugs are exceptionally profitable for the industry, but newer is definitely not better when it comes to patient safety. Few people realize that “new” means that the drug has been tried in a smaller number of patients and for a shorter period of time than drugs that have been around for years. Despite these limited studies, new meds quickly reach millions of consumers through very effective direct-to-consumer advertising.

It is often not until these drugs are consumed by the masses that potential problems (or public awareness of problems) in the form of dangerous and deadly side effects begin to arise. Patients who take “new” drugs become unknowing guinea pigs.

Dorothy Hamill spinning around the rink and driving millions to their docs for Vioxx served as a testament to this scenario. But even the Vioxx fallout has not stopped Merck’s machine as they now push marketing and mandates for Gardasil, their HPV vaccine.

Reeling ‘em in

Women need to know that they are being studied, targeted, and manipulated by very effective advertising that has little to do with good science. The ads and the target markets are heavily researched by internal marketing departments, branding experts and advertising companies.

In order to effectively drive sales with the important female demographic, companies first identify which issues in life women are most concerned and/or insecure about. They then develop their entire marketing campaign around those issues rather than the specific science of the drug. Big bucks go into finding the emotional hot button for any given pill or medical problem. The majority of ads feature sexy, smiling, happy people — walking by the lake, rolling around with their children, or on a fun/hot date. We all want a little piece of that, don’t we? Pharma knows how to play off of women’s deepest insecurities and our biggest dreams…and it works.

The marketing of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was a perfect example. The industry capitalized on the vanity and emotional fears of women — resulting in billions of dollars in prescription revenue for the pharmaceutical industry and questionable efficacy and damaging side effects to women worldwide.

And yet…the beat goes on

We as women are marching into our doctors’ offices in record numbers demanding the latest and greatest pills we see on television. These ads paint a beautiful Norman Rockwell life on the screen. They do a wonderful job of convincing us that we too can be this happy, this sexy, this beautiful if only we would take this pill. The pharmaceutical companies are not selling us a drug; they are selling us a lifestyle.

The most severe drawbacks occur when the commercials result in us medicalizing our problems. Pharma has done a masterful job of creating illness and reasons for us to take more pills. Shyness, road rage, and even menstruation can now be treated with a drug. Thus we have begun demanding drugs we often don’t need and that could have serious potential for harm and sometimes even death.

The other drawback is that these ads create a false sense of security. We subconsciously feel we can be a little more reckless with our nutrition, or activity level, or even sleep because there is now a pill to take care of all of the issues that result from not taking good care of ourselves.

I am a reasonable person. I am a mom and wife who understands that in the right context, we need prescription medication to be available. That said, I am in the minority of consumers who knows both sides of the issue. And that knowledge can be our most powerful tool when it comes to effectively managing our own health or the health of our families.

Get enough of us gals knowing and we can potentially force the hand of pharma to concentrate on producing truly superior, safer, and more cost-effective drugs rather than producing effective marketing campaigns. Because they can’t sell what we won’t buy.

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This is another reason why women (and men) should seriously consider Chinese medicine. Not only has it been tested for up to three thousand years, but it’s all about health and wellness, not just selling a pill to drive a Multi-Billion dollar industry. ~ White-Eagle Perry M.S, LAc. Dipl. Ac.

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Treatment of diabetes through acupuncture. What is acupuncture, anyway? It is the process in which a practitioner puts in needles into points on the skin. Some think this generates the discharge of the body’s natural painkillers. Some of these scientists believe that acupuncture offers relief from constant pain so is good for people who suffer from neuropathy.

What is neuropathy? Well it is the painful nerve damage caused by diabetes. Often this leads to numbness and abnormal feeling. The pain is different from the usual pain of hitting a finger with a hammer. Pain caused by neuropathy is typically perceived as a fixed burning sensation. For some people the treatment of diabetes is acupuncture.

Treatment of diabetes through acupuncture is getting some recognition especially with the painful neuropathy. Considered as one of the oldest treatments, acupuncture has been employed for over two thousand years. The essential theory and method have remained the same despite some developments. At first, they used this therapy mainly in the east but has now infiltrated the west.

The Chinese believed that the performance of the body depends on the normal flow of energy or life force. They name this as Qi. This life force is in a constant state of change. There’s always an exchange between the Qi of the body and the Qi of the environment which can be good or harmful.

So when one is on a poor diet, his defenses are lowered. Stress can lower one’s resistance to disease. And so one can get sick. Doctors and therapists try hard help us heal ourselves by trying to boost our level of health in different ways. And one treatment of diabetes especially with neuropathy is acupuncture.

One of the basics of holistic practice is that no one part of the body can be disturbed without affecting the rest of the other parts. If any disturbance is allowed to continue without treatment, it will spread to the other parts of the body. Treatment of diabetes is crucial then in restoring the body’s system.

The acupuncture system. and diagnosis may be different from those used in Western medicine but the patient will not find it different on his first visit. In fact many of the questions the practitioners ask are almost similar. What is different is the way the Chinese and Western doctors interpret the symptoms.

The Chinese treatment goal is not just to improve the condition but to remove its cause also. Sometimes though, they treat definite symptoms with acupuncture since some points have specific effects as in lowering the high blood pressure but they are not used as the total therapy. Treatment of diabetes has also for its goal to improve the health and remove the cause of the disease.

Like some other complementary treatments, acupuncture is a means of bringing back the body’s energy flow to a normal state to the point the body will be able to heal itself. With the deficiency in the body’s energy flow, the system must be stimulated.

Selecting the points to use in the treatment is not easy. The acupuncturist has to know the function of each point and the relationship between the points. He must know how to reinstate the system’s balance and to stimulate the body to function normally again. Hope it is just as easy to go through the treatment of diabetes.

Don’t be concerned at the thought of being stuck with a lot of needles. Instead think of the treatment of diabetes that is your goal. The acupuncturist is skilled at treating any condition with least number of needles. A patient is frequently treated with no more than five needles. In fact, sometimes one needle is enough.

Remember though that not every patient will respond the same way to acupuncture. People have different way of responding to treatment and with drugs often a few will be tried before finding what suit a patient the best. There is no one treatment that will suit everybody. And the treatment of diabetes is something you have to investigate.

However, if the treatment of diabetes you are getting right now is giving you disagreeable side effects, you may have to look elsewhere for something that may work for you. Sometimes people try one complementary therapy after another until they find the one that suits them the best.