Tag: acupuncture

alternative healthcare

engulfing“Right now, they [mspatients] are not getting the kind of information we as [health care] providers would like them to get,” Wray said.”

This is quoted from a Boston Globe article of the 11th September. ACTRIMS – ECTRIMS researchers were apparently concerned about the ‘perceptions’ of ms patients.

I’d like to know where would doctors and MS researchers present at the conference rather patients get information from?

Surely not them?

Are these the same groups of people who didn’t believe in the possibility of an overgrowth of candida albicans? (thinking of more than one old GP when i make this statement)?

The same people who throw antibiotics at a problem as a first line of defence? (thinking of an old GP when I make this statement) rather than further investigation of the problem. I appreciate GPs have little time per patient but perhaps we could consult a ‘project manager’ for our bodies or even be entrusted to be our own project managers?

We are perhaps the best people to be put in charge of enhancing our own health?

The same group of people who, along with most of the rest of us didn’t know the significance of a microbiota until we found out from various TED talks over the last few years and recently a BBC2 Horizon programme on allergies (I referred to one of the over 1,000,000 pages google finds on the subject in an earlier post?

The same people who thought stomach ulcers were caused by stress not an infection?

The same people who believe that what we eat can’t have as much effect on how we feel and function than their questionably effective pharmaceutical offerings? (thinking of an old neurologist when i make this statement).

The status quo can’t continue.

The image above comes from a collection of mine with the name Earth Abides, Ecclesiastes 1:4. It was the title of a 1949 American sci fi book my dad gave me by George R Stewart. The world’s population gets wiped out and civilisation goes about starting again amongst the remains of our current civilisation.

Looking back, to get an apocalyptic tale as I was on the cusp of becoming a teenager was very good. It taught me to question everything. The message I chose to take from the book was ‘nothing that lives on earth is forever but that’s ok because we can choose to adapt’ and the planet will continue.

Things seem to be changing and we now have architecture acknowledging the presence of and creating designs specifically to take advantage of omni present bacteria.

If we believe that the 20th century was all about stamping out pathogens and healthcare was involved in a mighty struggle between us and them (evil bacteria causing disease left right and centre). Then the 21st century shape of healthcare will be all about harnessing the power of these omnipresent beings to help us, the puny human.

Some question our faltering scientific progress in medicine (as an owner of a chronic condition one of those ‘some’ is me) and ask whether antibiotics represented the only noteworthy advance in medicine since William Harvey’s discovery of blood’s circulation in the body in the early 17thC. This discovery rather neatly yet arrogantly ignores the Ancient Chinese’ awareness of body systems (please see earlier post).

Perhaps I’m biased but I choose to firmly believe that asking questions and finding out answers can only be good for our brains.

I feel the image above still stands as a representation of all that we live amongst and stands as a fine illustration of the impermanence of man. This too shall pass could be an alternative title and probably, bacteria will continue, relentlessly, to play their part long after our petrol shops have gone!

Are doctors beginning to get it?

pleasing view of natureEverything is awesome! (apologies, I watched a movie yesterday, Lego related post to follow)

This piece of news came out on the anniversary of the start of the 2nd WW. One has no bearing on the other, I’m not big into coincidences and fate (I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that even though I use a word later on in this post I don’t knit my own muesli or believe in numerology). That’s not to say they don’t hold worth for some people but I’m not one of them.

Nowadays I spend my time researching or more precisely, wading through online ‘cures for MS’. For the record, I don’t think those words sit well in a statement and am highly wary of anyone who tries to jam them into a sentence together.

I’ve been building up to a post that was to be asking ‘Why Doctors Don’t Get It’. In it I refer to the Aesop’s fable of the wind and sun competing to get a man’s coat. We all know that the persuasive heat of the sun was far more effective than the brute force of the North wind.

Seeing this particular application of research based on dampening the allergic response in folk with troublesome allergies we have a sign that medical professionals are getting it. They may no longer see the words MS and choose to research treatments that, you could argue, are akin to using sledgehammers to crack nuts. It feels like doctors/consultants/experts don’t especially consider the bodies that carry the condition they’re creating a treatment for.

Does fear of this condition perhaps lie at the heart of why it’s been considered a perfectly acceptable treatment option to wipe out a fairly essential part of a human’s functioning? We need our immune system to defend against the many external assaults a body faces every day. Or is it that Western science practitioners, like small children are using a mallet to hammer a square peg into a round hole rather than examine the qualities of either component?

AIDS drugs and cancer therapies have been suggested and offered as a way to address our brain’s apparently self destructive tendencies. Let’s rush instead shall we to pharmaceutically punish the MSpatient/EMO self harmer by offering an already confused brain Lemtrada/alemtuzamab (a recycled cancer drug).

There’s nothing much binary about the human body so why has it been, until this recent development, that research has involved switching things off and on again?

Doctors can be so much more than IT support workers dealing with squashy cabinets!

I used to howl at the moon In an earlier blog and there I pondered on the difference between Eastern and Western medical practice. Both types seem to deal with the human body very differently.

From what I’ve experienced and read Eastern medicine considers our wobbling sacks of bones and processes holistically. I hesitate to use that word because I know it gets laughed out of a Western doctor’s waiting room (this is the word I was talking about at the beginning of the post). As if treating symptoms without addressing why a thing is happening has been shown to be a terribly evolved way of approaching the human body… please take a look at an earlier post I’d written about acupuncture at the beginning of the year in response to a frankly arrogant medical professional’s somewhat childish assessment of a science/methodology he’s chosen not to find out about. Like Western medicine has all the answers?

TCM v. Western Medicine

Traditional Chinese Medicine is taking more and more space in a GP’s toolbox of treatment options where whippersnapper Western Medicine is unable to provide help.

What breathtaking arrogance!

This post will be about a man who has an opinion reported to you by a woman who also has an opinion.

I make this clear because as human beings we could both hopefully have our voices listened to. As a medical professional, his opinion on medical matters can be rightly considered more important than those of a graphic designer/retired photographer.

With his training we could expect this professional to be an expert of sorts and after graduation when all his knowledge was fresh that would have been the case but there doesn’t seem to be the same need for CPD (continuing professional development) for doctors or consultants as there is for the rest of the general working public and so ignorant doctors are perhaps becoming more common?

If there was a need to brush up on what’s new in his profession then he would have been aware of all the research available:

All it takes nowadays is one Google search for “acupuncture pain relief research”.

As owners of a bopdy with its attendant aches and pains we are perhaps more invested in investigating methods to feel better than any expert might be? After all, they get to close the office door on our conditions at the end of their working day.

Dr David Calhoun was speaking on the World At One on radio4 on the 2nd of April, 2014 giving his response to learning that the NHS will be paying for acupuncture for their patients.

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Discussion between the enthusiastically ignorant Dr David Calhoun and Professor Martin Underwood is in the last 5 minutes of the 45 minute show. Dr Calhoun seemed thoroughly unimpressed that the NHS would be wasting their money paying for patients to receive acupuncture. A treatment that had no proof of worth in his professional opinion.

Professor Underwood on the other hand, had a far more pragmatic approach  He’s decided on the worth of many treatments that NICE will pay for and this treatment carries next to no side effects for the patient, is relatively cheap for the health service and may even help patients feel a little better.

Let’s save discussing the efficacy or otherwise of expensive, often side effect laden, pharmaceutical treatments on the market for another post.

By describing acupuncture as nothing more than ‘theatrical placebo’ Calhoun managed to rubbish a 6,000 year old medical system in the blink of an eye.

A system that’s been around three times longer than the time we’ve spent without Jesus can’t be without any merits, can it? How long has Western Medicine been around?

William Harvey ‘discovered’ the circulatory system of the human body in the 17th century and Whippersnapper Western Medicine has proceeded to ignore its presence and relevance in many disease states since then.

China have been aware of circulation for much of those 6000 years and some have argued that the poorly translated ‘qi’ ( the word whose use gets guffaws from the seemingly uninterested among the medical establishment) is in part related to the flow of blood which delivers energy by transporting oxygen and carbohydrates.

It could be argued that Harvey’s ‘discovery’ marked the start of Western Medicine but usually Hippocrates, who seems  revered as the father of modern medicine was also around before Jesus. By all accounts he was a big believer in talking to the patient and assessing how they look and how they say they feel.

This is something that western doctors appear to be losing the art of in favour of tests that will show a need for a pharmaceutical treatment. I appreciate this isn’t Dr Calhoun’s fault, perhaps he has a fantastic bedside manner which, in itself delivers a placebo effect to his lucky patients.

 

ps. The image is from a collection of mine that started as a response to the term zebra when used in a medical context. I photo’d the zebra while waiting for my vietnamese acupuncturist.

Medical students when receiving training have been told since a Dr Theodore Woodward (a 1940s Maryland US, MD), warned them, on hearing hoofbeats don’t look over your shoulder and expect to see a zebra. Exotic diseases are much less likely than the more commonplace.

Certain types of medical zebra appear to be becoming more common and that particular part of a doctor’s training, perhaps ought to change? (we’ll discuss elsewhere the way the disease MS has changed in its definition at least twice in my lifetime – is it auto-immune or inflammatory?)