Alternative Medicine News: San Jose Alternative Medicine Specialist Eternal Health Wellness Center Offers Seminar for Staying Healthy
San Jose Alternative Medicine Specialist Eternal Health Wellness Center Offers Seminar for Staying Healthy
Eternal Health Wellness Center will offer a seminar for staying healthy on Dec. 19 at 6 p.m.
Dr. Quli Zhou, L.A.C., M.S. will be conducting a seminar at Eternal Health Wellness Center, a San Jose alternative medicine provider, on Dec. 19 at 6:00 p.m. presenting information about staying healthy through Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM).
Dr. Zhou, a licensed Acupuncturist, has 25 years of experience in the field of Traditional Chinese Medicine. She will discuss the real causes of swine flu, and how to use practical methods such as eating certain foods, adjusting one’s lifestyle and pressing energizing points to keep one’s body in perfect balance and remain healthy.
Dr. Zhou will also teach about relieving stress and pain, increasing energy, balancing hormones, reducing weight, feeling better and staying healthy.
“If you read the stories on H1N1 influence written by the mainstream media, you might incorrectly think there’s only one anti-viral drug in the world. Actually, Traditional Chinese Medicine has been used effectively to prevent and treat flu for thousands of years. Many herbs have the effect of being anti-viral and anti-bacterial. Or just simply use acupressure points to strengthen your own immune system to keep yourself from getting sick,” said Dr. Zhou.
“That’s astonishing to hear,” continues Dr. Zhou, “because the world is full of anti-viral medicine found in tens of thousands of different plants. Culinary herbs like thyme, sage and rosemary are anti-viral. Berries and sprouts are anti-viral. Garlic, ginger and onions are anti-viral. You can’t walk through a grocery store without walking past a hundred or more anti-viral medicines made by Mother Nature. Tamiflu is made from the star anise herb that’s been used for over 5,000 years in Traditional Chinese Medicine? TCM maintains that the flow of Qi energy determines the health of an individual. If there is abundant, smoothly flowing Qi, they are in good health and strong immunity. If they are ill, it is because of a blockage or interruption in the Qi flow. Some of the compounds have been used for centuries in TCM to fight the effects of colds and flu.”
“The seminar on Dec. 19 will be from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., and the cost is $15.00. Refreshments will be served. Empower your own healing! Bring a friend, and both you and your guest are free,” said Dr. Zhou.
Eternal Health Wellness Center offers free consultation and testing, a $125 value, plus the first 10 callers receive a full beam ray light treatment. They also offer free pulse diagnosis from 5 to 6pm.
Studying alternative medicine with taxpayer dollars
Thanks to a $374,000 taxpayer-funded grant, we now know that inhaling lemon and lavender scents doesn’t do a lot for our ability to heal a wound. With $666,000 in federal research money, scientists examined whether distant prayer could heal AIDS. It could not.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or NCCAM, also helped pay scientists to study whether squirting brewed coffee into someone’s intestines can help treat pancreatic cancer (a $406,000 grant) and whether massage makes people with advanced cancer feel better ($1.25 million). The coffee enemas did not help. The massage did.
NCCAM has also invested in studies of various forms of energy healing, including one based on the ideas of a self-described “healer, clairvoyant and medicine woman” who says her children inspired her to learn to read auras. The cost for that was $104,000.
A small, little-known branch of the National Institutes of Health, NCCAM was launched a dozen years ago to study alternative treatments used by the public but not accepted by mainstream medicine. Since its birth, the center has spent $1.4 billion, most of it on research.
A Chicago Tribune examination of hundreds of NCCAM grants, dozens of scientific papers, 12 years of NCCAM documents and advisory council meeting minutes found that the center had spent millions of taxpayer dollars on studies with questionable grounding in science. The cancer treatment involving coffee enemas was based on an idea from the early 1900s, and patients who chose to undergo the risky regimen lived an average of just four more months.
The spending comes as competition for public research money is fierce and expected to get fiercer, with funding for the NIH expected to plateau and even drop in coming years.
“Some of these treatments were just distinctly made up out of people’s imaginations,” said Dr. Wallace Sampson, clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University. “We don’t take public money and invest it in projects that are just made up out of people’s imaginations.”
“Lots of good science and good scientists are going unfunded,” said Dr. David Gorski, a breast cancer researcher at Wayne State University, who has been a vocal critic of NCCAM. “How can we justify wasting money on something like this when there are so many other things that are much more plausible and much more likely to result in real benefit?”
The director of the center and other advocates say it is worthwhile to use taxpayer dollars to study certain alternative treatments.
“They deserve scientific attention,” said NCCAM Director Dr. Josephine Briggs, who noted that the center’s $128-million annual allotment amounts to less than half a percent of the total NIH budget.
Briggs, a respected NIH researcher and physician who has headed NCCAM for nearly four years, said in an interview that she is dedicated to evidence-based medicine and that the center, under her leadership, is committed to rigorous scientific studies.
The center’s recently adopted strategic plan focuses on studies of supplements and other natural products along with the effect of “mind and body” therapies like yoga, massage and acupuncture on pain and other symptoms. In fiscal years 2008-11, NCCAM funded more than $140 million in grants involving mind-and-body therapies, including $33 million for pain research in fiscal 2011.
The new strategic plan “reflects real change or an evolution in our mission,” Briggs said. “We are not your grandmother’s NCCAM.”
Studies of energy healing or distant prayer probably would not get funded by NCCAM today, she said.
Yet many mind-and-body treatments that are being studied, like qigong and acupuncture, also involve the purported manipulation of a universal energy or life force, sometimes called qi — metaphysical concepts unproved by science and incompatible with the modern Western understanding of how the body works.
In an email, Briggs wrote that it wasn’t necessary to invoke qi or other ancient concepts to study therapies that may benefit people with chronic pain, a significant health problem.
NCCAM’s continuing interest in acupuncture comes even though many of its studies have found that acupuncture and similar therapies work no better than a placebo treatment at easing symptoms like pain and fatigue.
Responsible alternative medicine
Trine Tsouderos’ article on NCCAM is off base. Applying rigorous research to evaluate therapies that are widely used but not a part of mainstream medicine is not only a wise use of resources; it is also good science and essential for providing optimal clinical care.
Many people suffer from ailments, such as chronic pain, for which our conventional medicines do not provide significant help, and they seek relief from therapies such as acupuncture. Lab research and studies using the latest high tech imaging such as fMRI and pet-scans, funded by NCCAM and others, have resulted in a better understanding of the mechanisms of action of acupuncture, showing that it releases endorphins and other neurotransmitters that are the brain’s natural painkillers. NCCAM’s support of large clinical trials, such as one our team conducted and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, has shown acupuncture to be more effective than sham acupuncture and conventional care alone for relieving pain and improving function among sufferers of knee osteoarthritis. Furthermore, their support of the Cochrane Collaboration (an international organization dedicated to evaluating all medical therapies) an independent nonprofit organization that conducts reviews of clinical trials) Complementary Medicine Field has meant that data has been pooled from research studies worldwide, indicating acupuncture, while not a panacea for all problems, is safe and effective for a number of pain-related conditions including headaches, osteoarthritis and chronic back pain.