The Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center is known throughout the world for its innovative and often revolutionary cancer treatments. What may be surprising is that members of the Mass General team are supplementing their biomedical cancer treatments with a therapy so ancient that it predates recorded history. The therapy? Acupuncture.
Photo by Shutterstock 281440808. Image of an acupuncturist pointing at BL17 on an acupuncture model sourced from Shutterstock. Available here.
This review summarizes the biological activities of YCHD and its medical applications. The main active compounds of YCHD are chlorogenic acid, rhein, geniposide, emodin, and scoparone. The pharmacological actions of YCHD include inhibition of hepatic steatosis, apoptosis, necrosis, anti-inflammation, and immune regulation. YCHD could be developed as a new therapeutic strategy for the treatment of hepatic diseases.
By Jpbrigand (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Essential oils are natural antimicrobials that have the potential to provide a safer alternative to synthetic antimicrobials currently used in the food industry. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate the antimicrobial and antioxidant activities of essential oils from white wormwood, rose-scented geranium and bay laurel against Salmonella typhimurium and Escherichia coli O157:H7 on fresh produce and to examine consumer acceptability of fresh produce treated with these essential oils.
Friedrich Haag [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
For more than a decade, Bill Cook has gotten a weekly massage. He isn’t a professional athlete. He didn’t receive a lifetime gift certificate to a spa. Nor is the procedure a mere indulgence, he says – it’s medicinal.
Photo by Shutterstock 291691319. Image of a close portrait of a young woman during a Reiki session sourced from Shutterstock. Available here.
Young dandelion leaves are a wonderful spring tonic as they offer lots of nutrition with a bit of bitter flavor. When your body detects bitterness, it helps stimulate lots of different stages of digestion, from increased saliva, which breaks down carbohydrates, to HCL in the stomach, to bile production and release, which helps to break down fats, to a variety of digestive enzymes. Many people are beginning to realize that the lack of bitter foods and drinks in our diet is an underlying cause for many of the rampant digestive issues we see today.
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Researchers at the University of Oregon designed "The Mouse Meditation Project" to explore the connection between stress, brain activity, and meditation.
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Further, postoperative pain scores and the incidence of side-effects were all lower in the transcutaneous electric acupoint stimulation group. In conclusion, transcutaneous electric acupoint stimulation can significantly improve the quality of recovery and decrease the incidence of anaesthesia-related side-effects for patients undergoing ambulatory surgery.
Unsplash. (n.d.). [Mujer en traje médico azul de pie junto a mujer en túnica blanca]. Unsplash. Available here.
Acupuncture relieves pain due to shingles, reduces the need for painkillers, speeds the healing of herpes zoster lesions, and reduces the incidence of postherpetic neuralgia (PHN). Tianjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine researchers combined acupuncture with standard drug therapy. Patients receiving both drug therapy and acupuncture in a combined treatment protocol had superior patient outcomes compared with patients using only drug therapy.
Image by Mariegriffiths at the English language Wikipedia. Licensed under GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A study published Thursday in Health Psychology found that among people who fell ill after being exposed to a cold virus, those who were lonely were more likely to report severe runny nose, sneezing, sore throat and other symptoms. That adds to the evidence linking loneliness to more serious health problems including heart disease and early death.
Arief Rahman Saan (Ezagren) [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons
Loneliness is a well-established risk factor for poor physical health. Much less is known about
how loneliness affects patient-reported outcomes (PROs), such as somatic symptoms, which are increasingly important for guiding symptom management and assessing quality of patient care.
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This open-label, prospective, phase I/II trial was performed to establish the safety and efficacy of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) herbal products for treating non–anemia-related fatigue in patients with cancer.
Its full name, kway teow pad Thai, hints at its possible Chinese origins; kway teow, in Chinese, refers to rice noodles. It is likely that some early version of the dish came to Thailand with settlers crossing from southern China, who brought their own recipe for fried rice noodles...The cooked meats and vegetables in pad Thai resemble dishes prepared by the Cantonese and Tae Chiew (Chao Zhou in Mandarin) from China’s eastern Guangdong province. Nevertheless, the flavors and textures are pure Thai.
By Andy Mitchell from Glasgow, UK (Pad Thai with Prawn) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
When faced with the image of a sumotori (a sumo wrestler or rikishi),1 most food-minded people are likely to ask, “What do they eat to look like that?” I asked this question as a high-school exchange student in Japan a decade ago and have been exploring it ever since.
Tōshūsai Sharaku. Ukiyo-e print of the seven-year-old sumo wrestler Daidōzan Bungorō, 1794. Image sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Available here.
The earliest use of cupping that is recorded is from the famous Taoist alchemist and herbalist, Ge Hong (281–341 A.D.). The method was described in his book A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies, in which the cups were actually animal horns, used for draining pustules. As a result of using horns, cupping has been known as jiaofa, or the horn technique. In a Tang Dynasty book, Necessities of a Frontier Official, cupping was prescribed for the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis (or a similar disorder). More recently, Zhao Xuemin, during the Qing Dynasty, wrote Supplement to Outline of Materia Medica, including an entire chapter on “fire jar qi” (huoquan qi). In it, he emphasized the value of this treatment, using cups made of bamboo or pottery, in alleviating headache of wind-cold type, bi syndrome of wind origin, dizziness, and abdominal pain.
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The Lingshu (Spiritual Pivot) and its companion volume, the Suwen (Simple Questions), written around 100 B.C., established the fundamentals of traditional Chinese medical ideas and acupuncture therapy (3, 4). Originally, there was a set of 9 acupuncture needles, which included the triangular lance, sword-like flat needles, and fairly large needles (see Figure 1). In the Lingshu (3) these ancient needles are numbered and the needle designs and qualities are associated with what the numbers represent. Regarding the fourth needle, which has a tubular body and lance-like tip, the text states: "This can be used to drain fevers, to draw blood, and to exhaust chronic diseases." The seventh needle is described as being hair fine (corresponding in form to the most common of the current needles); it is said to "control fever and chills and painful rheumatism in the luo channels." In modern practice, using the lance as a means to treat chronic diseases has been marginalized (except to treat acute flare-ups of chronic ailments), while the applications of the hair-fine needle has been greatly expanded beyond malarial fevers and muscle and joint pain.
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The rabbit, called in Chinese the Jade Rabbit or the Moon Rabbit, is a companion of the Moon Goddess who never grows old. It makes medicine by grinding herb with a mortar and pestle.
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More often than not, when a patient presents to the office, it is for a pain complaint. Headache, neck pain, low back pain, sciatica, carpal tunnel. . . The pain is often the focus of the patient's mindset, and they don't often have any thought of what comes after the pain.
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My name is Adam. I am a human being, a husband, a father, a pediatric palliative care physician, and an associate residency director. I have a history of depression and suicidal ideation and am a recovering alcoholic...Yet mine is a story of recovery: I am a survivor of an ongoing national epidemic of neglect of physicians’ mental health.
Fve is a fungal protein isolated from the golden needle mushroom Flammulina velutipes and has previously been reported to trigger immunological responses in both mouse and human lymphocytes. In this study, we evaluated the potential application of Fve as an adjuvant for tumour immunotherapy and examined the underlying mechanism(s).
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Obesity and associated conditions, such as type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), are currently a worldwide health problem. In Asian traditional medicine, Bai-Hu-Jia-Ren-Shen-Tang (BHJRST) is widely used in diabetes patients to reduce thirst. However, whether it has a therapeutic effect on T2DM or NAFLD is not known. The aim of this study was to examine whether BHJRST had a lipid-lowering effect using a HuS-E/2 cell model of fatty liver induced by palmitate and in a db/db mouse model of dyslipidemia.
By Clément Bardot (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons