Alternative healing, meditation, new age, crystals, etc...

[sgreger1]

I went through a period from spring through fall 2009 when I became fascinated with all of it, but my interest has faded some since then. I spent hours at Above Top Secret reading about things such as the Universal Mind, Qi, meditation, astral projection, altered states, aliens, ancient civilizations, and many many other things.

Yah I think we've all spent plenty of time trolling around ATS lol. Even if it's all BS, it's definately more fun to read than the news!

[tom502]

I read it every day.

[snusgetter]

Interesting news about acupuncture treatments...

~
Acupuncture, Real or Fake, Eases Pain - Well Blog


Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Fake acupuncture appears to work just as well for pain relief as the real thing, according to a new study of patients with knee arthritis.

The findings, published in the September issue of the journal Arthritis Care and Research, are the latest to suggest that a powerful but little understood placebo effect may be at work when patients report benefits from acupuncture treatment, which involves inserting thin needles deeply into the skin at specific points on the body.

The study, from the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, tracked 455 patients with painful knee arthritis who received either traditional Chinese acupuncture or a sham treatment. A control group of patients was put on a waiting list for acupuncture treatment. Patients were told only that the study was comparing a traditional versus nontraditional form of acupuncture.

In the real treatment group, needles were inserted at specific points on the body and manipulated in accordance with traditional Chinese acupuncture techniques. In the sham treatment group, needles also were inserted, but not at the locations traditionally used for acupuncture. Electrical stimulation was also used, although those in the sham group received lower voltage and far shorter treatments.

Compared to people on the waiting list for treatment, both the real and sham acupuncture groups had statistically significant reductions in pain, averaging about a one point drop in pain on a scale of 1 to 7. The researchers also found that the enthusiasm of the person inserting the needles had a small but statistically significant effect. Patients reported slightly more pain relief when they were treated by someone who said “I’ve had a lot of success with treating knee pain,” compared with a practitioner who took a more neutral stance, saying “It may or may not work for you.”

The results don’t mean acupuncture doesn’t work, but they do suggest that the benefits of both real and fake acupuncture may have something to do with the way the body transmits or processes pain signals. Other studies have suggested that the prick of a needle around the area of injury or pain could create a “super-placebo” effect that alters the way the brain perceives and responds to pain.

The study design may also have blurred the lines between real and fake acupuncture, muting the effects of the real thing. For instance, in traditional Chinese acupuncture, the needle insertion points are along specific areas called meridians, but the exact point of insertion is decided on a patient-by-patient basis, depending on the patient’s body and area of pain. In the study, however, a standard map was used so that the needle insertion point was the same for every patient. In addition, trained acupuncturists also were asked to administer the fake treatment and insert needles at specific points outside of traditional meridians. Although researchers sometimes stepped into treatment sessions to check on the location of the needles, it’s possible that some of the sham treatments were similar to real acupuncture.

The current findings are similar to a 2007 study of 1,200 patients with back pain who were also given real acupuncture, a sham treatment or traditional back care such as physical therapy or exercise treatment. In that study about half the patients in both the real and fake acupuncture groups reported significant pain relief compared to only 27 percent of those receiving traditional back care. In that study, however, real acupuncture did reduce the need for pain medicine. Only 15 percent of patients who received real acupuncture used extra pain medication, but 34 percent of patients in the sham group and 59 percent of patients in conventional therapy needed extra pain pills.

A 2007 National Health Interview Survey found that an estimated 3.1 million Americans had used acupuncture in the past year. Back pain is the most common reason patients seek acupuncture treatment, followed by joint pain, neck pain, migraines and other forms of recurring pain.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine offers an extensive review of the research on acupuncture, including studies of acupuncture for back pain, knee arthritis, post traumatic stress, fibromyalgia and fertility treatment.

[tom502]

Some believe chiropractic practice is a quackery.

[snusgetter]

Now that you mention it...

Some believe chiropractic practice is a quackery.

Chiropractors gain more acceptance

BY CYNTHIA BILLHARTZ GREGORIAN
Wednesday, August 4, 2010 12:00 am

Carol Ziel's bad knees had changed her gait and that new gait made her whole body hurt.

Her knees felt great after two surgeries to repair them. But everything else kept right on hurting. So Ziel, 62, of St. Louis, made an appointment to see a chiropractor.

"She did an assessment and found that my hips were kind of twisted, and she unlocked my ankles and worked on my neck," Ziel said. "She got my skeletal system back in line, so I'm virtually pain-free now."

Her friends and family don't think she's wacky for seeing a chiropractor, she said. They see chiropractors as legitimate. But Ziel wouldn't have dreamed of talking to her orthopedic surgeon about seeing a chiropractor.

"A lot of medical doctors still aren't accepting of them," she said.

Her assessment is right. Sort of.

Nearly 120 years after D.D. Palmer founded chiropractic and 75 years after Logan College of Chiropractic in Chesterfield opened, public perceptions of this alternative health discipline have changed dramatically, among patients and health care providers.

Medical doctors now refer patients to chiropractors. A growing number of insurance companies covers chiropractic treatments. And the Higher Learning Commission recognizes Logan College the same way as Washington University, St. Louis University and the University of Missouri.

Experts point to several reasons why chiropractic has gained legitimacy: Its educational requirements are more rigorous and require traditional medical training; it has dumped snake-oil treatments for proven modalities; and the American Medical Association no longer discredits it.

Yet skepticism lingers.

"We still run across it. I'm not going to say it's totally dead," said Jennifer McCleary, who owns Triad Sports & Family Chiropractic in St. Louis and Creve Coeur.

McCleary said she graduated from Logan College in 2005 with an optimistic view about her career choice, because she'd trained under such a highly integrative approach.

The five-year program included classes in dissection, physiology, microbiology, pathology and biochemistry, just like medical doctors.

"Because I'm a younger grad, I kind of get taken aback when people have a negative reaction, or are scared, or their primary doctor isn't receptive to working with me. It's kind of hurtful," she said.

A SORDID PAST
The chiropractic discipline has had its black spots. Chiropractors once believed that a vertebral subluxation or out-of-whack spinal joint could interfere with the body's function and cause all sorts of systemic diseases.

"I think if you go back to D.D. Palmer, he felt that by adjusting the spine you could treat in-grown toenails and warts on the nose," said Gerald Yurth, a 1960 Logan College alum.

Dr. Daniel Scodary, a neurosurgeon at North County Neurosurgery in Bridgeton, remembers when they'd prescribe coffee ground enemas and knew an "old-school" chiropractor who refused traditional cancer treatments after he was diagnosed with early stage prostate cancer.

It could have been easily cured, Scodary maintains, but the chiropractor thought he could take care of it himself. He ended up dying a tortuously painful death.

"That mentality has changed," he said. "I think chiropractors now understand pathology and microbiology much better. They recognize that if you have a strep infection of the throat, it needs antibiotics."

McCleary thinks there's a clear line of demarcation when it comes to those who are leery of chiropractors. They're almost always over age 60, she said.

Yurth, who has a thriving practice in St. Joseph, Mo., said that lingering resistance stems for a long-term campaign that the American Medical Association waged against chiropractic.

"They were doing a lot of propaganda," he said. "We were in the classification of quacks, and it was demeaning. I don't know if they felt like we were intruding. I think it was territorial."

That started to change in the 1980s when several chiropractors, led by Chester A. Wilk, won a series of antitrust lawsuits against the AMA and other prominent medical groups.

The law proceedings showed that the medical groups had undermined chiropractic schools, undercut insurance programs for chiropractic patients and concealed evidence of the effectiveness of chiropractic care.

Until then, Yurth said, traditional doctors had no choice but to say that there were only two ways to treat musculoskeletal problems — by having surgery or prescribing drugs.

"Those treatments weren't unnecessary, but they did them before other things were tried," he said. "Jumping into surgery is very serious business, but they didn't consider chiropractic as an alternative."

Today, he said, neurosurgeons are becoming much more conscious that when they fuse the spine, the area above and below it often becomes more stressed.

"If we can get the body in a position where it's stabilized (with chiropractic), it can maintain itself without surgery," he said.

A GROWING PROFESSION
Today more than 60,000 chiropractors practice in the United States, according to the American Chiropractic Association. Typically, patients get chiropractic treatment for back and neck pain, headaches, sports injuries, motor vehicle accident injuries, repetitive strains and arthritis.

In recent years, more medical doctors are referring patients to chiropractors or working with them to treat patients.

They've become a viable and natural alternative to treatments that include surgery and drugs.

St. John's Mercy Medical Center has created an integrative medicine program that uses the services of chiropractors.

"When physicians are struggling with chronic conditions, such as fibromyalgia, low-back pain, headaches, and traditional medicine isn't helping, they'll refer the patient to us," said Michelle Smith, director of the St. John's Mercy program.

Logan College and Southeast Missouri Hospital in Cape Girardeau have created a program that brings together chiropractors and traditional doctors such as neurosurgeons and osteopaths, to talk about how they treat patients.

"So they all learn, from integrative standpoint, how the different treatments compare to one another," said George Goodman, president of Logan College. "And it also gives greater confidence to both the chiropractors and the doctors that when they refer a patient, they're going to be treated properly."

Scodary refers patients who aren't good surgical candidates to chiropractors after they've exhausted all other options, including pain management and physical therapy.

"Why not?" he said. "A lot of them are surprised and a lot come back and say it helped."

There's legislation before Congress to require all major Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers to provide chiropractic care and there's already a chiropractic department at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Three years ago, leaders at Logan College were confident enough in their profession that they spent $27 million renovating and expanding their school.

This doesn't surprise Scodary.

"They didn't build that school because what they're doing is hocus-pocus," he said. "It's a very nice facility and it evolved because people believe in them."

[sgreger1]

Snusgetter:

That is a great article. That further illustrates my point that placebo plays a MAJOR role in whether or not somethign works, be it green tea or FDA approved pharmaceuticals.

The World Health Organization and the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) have stated that acupuncture can be effective in the treatment of neurological conditions and pain. It has multiple studies backing it up and is accepted in our official medical guidelines. Insurance companies can't deny it and patients have a positive outcome after treatment.

It's just like pills. ADD pills for example. A recent study showed that (I think it was Ritalin) worked as well as the placebo. Both showing the same amount of improvement.


The placebo effect is powerfull, if the human brain believes it is being healed, than it will heal the body. At the end of the day the brain (and other body parts) have control over your entire body, from stem cells all the way to how much pain you feel. If it is convinced something is working, it will make sure it works.



Also, Chiro is complete BS but again it is recognized by the appropriate authorities and accepted in the guidelines.

[devilock76]

HEHEHE and for my first post here....

Oh wait I think I said everything I had to say about all this on the snuff forums.

Ken

[bipolarbear1968]

Devilock76, I see you and Tom met already....

[snusgetter]

devilock76 -- WELCOME OVERBOARD??

[snusgetter]

Integrative medicine: to complement Western treatments with other methods

~
Almost Half of Americans Use Alternative Medicine | American Life

Growing demand prompts universities, US government to get involved in treatment, research

Susan Logue Koster | Washington, DC 18 August 2010

In the United States, more patients are turning to alternative and complementary medicine as part of their health care.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health say that nearly 40 percent of adults have used some type therapy that isn't taught in medical schools. But more than 40 U.S. universities, including Stanford, UCLA, Duke and The George Washington University have integrative medicine centers.

Jean Ayers is not a regular patient. She is studying to be a physician assistant at George Washington University, which includes taking an elective course in integrative medicine. Participating in treatments is strongly encouraged.

"In most of my training as a physician assistant, we look at a patient's history and symptoms and then come up with a quote differential diagnosis," says Ayers. "Here we focus more on the symptoms as indicative of lifestyle and symbolic of larger issues."

The Center for Integrative Medicine at the George Washington University Medical Center was founded in 1988 by Dr. John Pan, who had practiced as an obstetrician and gynecologist for more than 25 years. He says the center has about 6,000 patient visits a year. Most have tried conventional medicine.

"They have gone to Hopkins. They have gone to the Mayo Clinic," says Pan. "They aren't solving their problem. They are telling them nothing can be done, you have to live with it and they are seeking the last resort."

That includes patients like Anna Sterud. After a two-year battle with ovarian cancer, including surgery, chemotherapy and a clinical trial, she decided to try vitamin C infusions.

"I'm very much for scientifically proven methods of treatment, but when you feel your time is starting to run out, you feel you just have to go 100 percent and look for alternatives and that is what I did."

With more Americans turning to alternatives, the U.S. government founded The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine as part of the National Institutes of Health.

"Our job here at the National Institutes of Health is to bring really good science to these really interesting practices," says Dr. Josephine Briggs, the center's director.

Practices that are considered outside mainstream medicine, like the use of dietary supplements, meditation and yoga, as well as chiropractic adjustments, acupuncture, reiki - or therapeutic touch - and massage. A survey by the NIH in 2007 indicated four in 10 Americans use one of these practices, most often to treat pain.

"I think that the extent to which Americans are interested in these practices is a good reason for them being studied," says Briggs. "We do do our best to provide reliable information on our website about methods. That material is carefully reviewed by peers and scientific experts."
Testing some alternative therapies can be difficult. Scientists still aren't certain how acupuncture works.

"There may be direct effects of the stimulation on the nervous system that change pain processing and our researchers are looking at those," says Briggs. "But part of this may be expectation and the reassurance of the practitioner, the effect of the ritual. Some people call it the placebo effect. If it helps, however, it is worth knowing about."

Dr. Deirdre Orceyre is both a naturopathic physician and Chinese medicine practitioner at the Center for Integrative Medicine. She sometimes uses acupuncture for her patients.

"I try my best to use it in conjunction with the more Western model with natural or conventional and bring that in as a perspective and a healing modality."

That is the philosophy behind integrative medicine, to complement Western treatments with other methods.

"For me it was very important to do both, because I believe in the scientifically approved methods," says Sterud, the cancer patient.

She's encouraged that her oncologist has asked her to share information on her experience at the Center for Integrative Medicine.

Good start, allopathy, but only a start. When will we all recognize the bias and the absurdity in calling allopathy "traditional" and any other method "alternative" when many of the other approaches have been around for thousands of years longer? When will allopaths be willing to recognize that for some people and some conditions, allopathy is appropriately the "complement" to a main course of other modes of healing? I'm not holding my breath...

[chadizzy1]

Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.

I got the Star Wars reference

[NonServiam]

I've been watching a lot of the Penn and Teller Bullshit shows on Youtube lately. While I agree with about 85% of their opinions, I just cannot agree with the close minded stance they take on the paranormal and supernatural. If Penn and Teller can't be presented with hard, physical, tangible evidence of something than it most certainly must not exist and anyone who does believe it exists is a f*%$ing idiot. But Penn and Teller do an excellent job at exposing the frauds of the new age industry and stupidity of the population.

While hard evidence is an important factor in keeping you grounded in reality and not being duped by cons, I believe there is just some things that exist in our universe which we cannot detect.

I was staring at the walls the other day and began to ponder on the reality experienced by a person who was born both blind and deaf. Their entire existence and perception is based solely on smell, taste, and touch. And to them, they are perfectly content in this existence unaware of the actual reality. Or at least "actual" as what we perceive with two more senses than they were born with. It is really quite mind boggling to sit and try to fathom such an existence.

[Frosted]

I don't mean to be pedantic, but does anyone actually have the 'Ghostbusters' number?

[chadizzy1]

I don't mean to be pedantic, but does anyone actually have the 'Ghostbusters' number?

The phone number for the Ghostbusters as it appears on the television ad that Dana sees in her apartment is 555-2368.
Source(s):
http://www.imdb.com

[devilock76]

Devilock76, I see you and Tom met already....

One could say that.

Ken