Body, mind, and Chinese medicine
Tuesday June 23, 2009
Categories: Healing
In his 1993 PBS series (and companion volume) "Healing and the Mind," Bill Moyers went to China with Dr. David Eisenberg of Harvard Medical School, who is trained in both Western and Chinese medicine. Here are a couple of interesting...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Does gingko do anything to change the mental competence of people with dementia? Important question. Does acupuncture, chiropractic, massage and having those therapies available to people in our workforce change the course of acute low back pain or chronic low back pain for people on assembly lines? Good questions. To do those studies often takes five, six, seven, ten years.
Dr. Eisenberg alludes also to another problem, and a serious one.
No one is going to make a dime off of gingko, particularly. It's a common enough substance, it cannot be patented, it is freely available. The same is true of most "alternative" medicine.
In our profit-based medical system the big research bucks go to substances invented by big pharma, which can be patented, and upon which the inventor stands to make substantial money.
Unless we can somehow divert money from the consuming public as a whole (as opposed to a for-profit drug company) we will not see such studied done on a large scale.
(No! No! Group action by we, the people of the United States, would be "socialized medicine"!!)
Even if they can perform a well designed study they might not get usable data. Many of the health studies I've read in the last few years have convinced me that some medical researchers couldn't tell the difference between correlation and causation if you handed them a dictionary with the letter 'C' bookmarked.
I spent 2 years on a statin called Crestor. Even though I felt fine, my doctor at the time was concerned because my LDL was slightly elevated and my triglycerides were off the charts. (They were over 900 on one test - seriously). After a few months on Crestor I began having very bad muscle pain and weakness. Some mornings I had to have help from my wife just to get out of bed. This is not something normal for a reasonably healthy guy in his mid-30's. Further, my LDL barely budged and my triglycerides never dropped below 200. I switched doctors and the new one took me off of Crestor and had me take CoQ10 supplements. (Statin drugs block CoQ10 production which is what causes the muscle problems). That fixed the pain in a couple of weeks.
But I also began taking fish oil capsules. I take about 3 grams of Omega-3's per day from fish oil. My LDL and triglycerides are now both around 100 and my HDL has come up. Just from $15-20 a month of fish oil capsules. Well guess what? Now that there is actual data showing that high-dose Omega-3 can lower triglyceride levels the drug companies are hopping in. GlaxoSmithKline has a prescription Omega-3 capsule called Lovaza. It will produce the same effects in 3-4 capsules a day as I get from 10 fish oil capsules. It also costs $250-300 a month. Which path do you think your doc would recommend?
Personally, my doctor would recommend the OTC. I have knee issues, and he has repeatedly recommend I take fish oil on glucosomine chondroitin OTC supplements. He didn't recommend the more expensive name-brand RXs, or the Joint Ease highly marketed products.
He said "You should be taking x mg every day, get it from the nutritional aisle".
The one downside, that I'm not even really going to complain about because the cost is so low, is that nutritional supplements and vitamins are not reimbursible under my flex spending account, even though an Rx containing the same ingredients would be.
Merlin
Get a gold card at GNC and you can usually get their fish oil "buy one get one free". The gold card is about $15 and I usually pay about $18 for a bottle of 360 capsules. I've gotten an extra free bottle on my last several trips so it's a pretty long running promotion.
I have willingly and knowingly removed myself from the medical-industrial complex. I will do everything within my realm of influence to take care of my body and my mind (including fish oil supplements, which I discovered years ago).
I refuse to participate in the health industry. I will eventually die--the cause is irrelevant. No need to bankrupt myself in the meantime.
BTW, lecithin is also helpful in maintaining vascular health. Exercise and diet are also vita.
Thanks Nice post
Rich, triglyceride levels of 900?? Whoa! Thanks for the story about the fish oil. Very interesting. Glad you hit on a very healthy, definitely better answer for the triglycerides and glad you shared this information. It is helpful for a family member that recently tested a bit high for triglycerides.
KateA,
I hope you stay off of horses and bicycles and out of automobiles. If you break a bone, any bone, you will not find that lecithin tablets are much help; if you incur a compound fracture and do not seek help from "the medical-industrial complex" you will probably die of infection. That's what almost always happened in such cases, back in the day.
If it's OK with you that a broken arm is a death sentence, you're on the right track. Otherwise you might re-think your position.
Michele
When I got that result I thought I was going to die any second but my doc said to relax, because he had seen triglyceride levels up around 2000 before! I didn't even know that was possible.
On the fish oil, I started by taking 5 capsules a day just before breakfast and gradually added more before dinner until I reached 10 a day. That puts me at around 3 grams of Omega 3 a day which has worked like a charm for me. Some people may get the same results with a bit less or more.
One thing to consider though - make sure you get fish body oil rather than liver oil (i.e. cod liver oil). The liver oils can have such concentrated levels of vitamin A that you can get toxic on it. Fish body oil won't though.
I should've been more specific:
I don't have a problem with medical attention for physical injuries, like broken bones and cuts that require stitches and antibiotics. I'm a willing partaker of flu shots.
I'm not participating in the disease-of-the-month diagnosis and the use of prescription medicines to deal with chronic ailments. The "industrial" part of the problem.
Sometimes, as humans, we get aches and pains and Americans just can't seem to accept that.
Cholesterol issues, Type II diabetes, all that stuff--lifestyle is largely the cause (and the cure, if you change your lifestyle in time).
Prescription drugs are not the solutions to health issues, most of the time.
I should mention that I won't take a swine flu shot, even though I've not missed a flu shot since 2001. If they do a combo, I'll sit out this year's flu shots. I don't trust that they can determine side effects quickly enough for the "newfangled" stuff.
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