Wednesday, February 10, 2010

I (Heart) the Heart

February is the American Heart Association's Heart Health Awareness Month, emphasizing the dangers of heart disease and the importance of heart health. Heart disease includes conditions affecting the heart, such as coronary heart disease, heart attacks, congestive heart failure, and congenital heart disease. Despite dramatic medical advances over the past fifty years, heart disease remains a leading cause of death globally and the number one cause of death in the United States. By integrating acupuncture and Oriental medicine into your heart healthy lifestyle, you can dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease.


Taking small steps to improve your health can reduce your risk for heart disease by as much as eighty percent. Steps to prevention include managing high blood pressure, quitting smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, reducing stress and improved sleep - all of which can be helped with acupuncture.

1. Manage High Blood Pressure
High blood pressure makes the heart work harder, increasing its oxygen demands and contributing to angina. This excessive pressure can lead to an enlarged heart (cardiomegaly), as well as damage to blood vessels in the kidneys and brain. It increases the risk of heart attacks, stroke and kidney disease.

Acupuncture has been found to be particularly helpful in lowering blood pressure. By applying acupuncture needles at specific sites along the wrist, inside the forearm or in the leg, researchers at the Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, were able to stimulate the release of opioids, which decreases the heart's activity and thus its need for oxygen. This, in turn, lowers blood pressure.
2. Quit Smoking
Most people associate cigarette smoking with breathing problems and lung cancer. But did you know that smoking is also a major cause of coronary artery disease? In fact, about twenty percent of all deaths from heart disease are directly related to cigarette smoking.

Acupuncture has shown to be an effective treatment for smoking. Acupuncture treatments for smoking cessation focus on jitters, cravings, irritability, and restlessness; symptoms that people commonly complain about when they quit. It also aids in relaxation and detoxification.
3. Maintain a Healthy Weight
Obesity is associated with diabetes, high blood pressure and coronary artery disease, all of which increase the risk of developing heart disease, but studies have shown that excess body weight itself (and not just the associated medical conditions) can also lead to heart failure. Even if you are entirely healthy otherwise, being overweight still places you at a greater risk of developing heart failure.
Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine are an excellent adjunctive tool when it comes to losing weight. They can help to energize the body, maximize the absorption of nutrients, regulate elimination, control overeating, suppress the appetite, and reduce anxiety.
4. Reduce Stress
Stress is a normal part of life. But if left unmanaged, stress can lead to emotional, psychological, and even physical problems, including heart disease, high blood pressure, chest pains, or irregular heart beats. Medical researchers aren't sure exactly how stress increases the risk of heart disease. Stress itself might be a risk factor, or it could be that high levels of stress make other risk factors worse. For example, if you are under stress, your blood pressure goes up, you may overeat, you may exercise less, and you may be more likely to smoke.


Numerous studies have demonstrated the substantial benefits of acupuncture in the treatment of stress, anxiety and mental health. In addition to acupuncture, Oriental medicine offers a whole gamut of tools and techniques that can be integrated into your life to keep stress in check. These tools include Tui Na, Qi Gong exercises, herbal medicine, dietary therapy, meditations and acupressure that you can administer at home.

5. Improve Sleep
Poor sleep has been linked with high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, heart failure, heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, and obesity. Researchers have shown that getting at least eight hours of sleep is needed for good heart health and getting less than eight hours of sleep can put you at a greater risk for developing heart disease.
Acupuncture has shown great success treating a wide array of sleep problems without any of the side effects of prescription or over-the-counter sleep aids. The acupuncture treatments for problems sleeping focus on the root disharmony within the body that is causing the insomnia. Therefore, those who use acupuncture for insomnia achieve not only better sleep, but also an overall improvement of physical and mental health.

Come in for a consultation during Heart Health Awareness Month to see how acupuncture and Oriental medicine can assist you with your heart health and help you to live a longer, healthy life.   Reprinted from our February Newsletter here.


Saturday, January 16, 2010

As Above, So below…

This week my back fell apart, and for many of my patients their bodies fell apart (inexplicably for most).  And for hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti on Tuesday night, their entire world fell apart. 

I have, after having literally thousands of patient visits, become used to the way our bodies mirror the changes taking place on the planet, and the way many of my clients are tuned in to SOMETHING happening even before it does.  For many over the last few weeks, sleep has been poor, feelings of impatient and anxiety “climbing the walls” and the desire to hunker down at home have been common.  The spine  and digestion seem to be the big winners in our physical radar for something shifting massively on the planet over the last week. 

While separated by thousands of miles we are not separated from the people in Haiti.  Even if you don’t subscribe to the quantum physics piece that we are all connected at the atomic and energetic levels, we still connected as members of the human family.  So an entire country in ruins, the loss and grief of thousands of souls transitioning affects our collective family even if you don’t believe in energy of any kind. 

Hold them in your thoughts, keep sending positive energy and if you can send some money.  Thoughts are real, they have energy and intent, and if one soul is soothed by you holding them with love and good will then that will service be indeed.  Often we will not know the effects that our prayers or good thoughts have in the collective but I believe in that power nevertheless.

As the ground stops shaking and the recovery begins, our bodies will again find their center, although true north will be forever changed by what has transpired this week.  Certain eastern traditions teach us that when this many souls agree to transition together, a tremendous space in opened for all of humanity, for a paradigm shift in the heart of some kind.  I have seent his now with 9/11, Katrina, the tsunami.  We won’t know the nature of that shift for some time – a massive letting go.  Watch your dreams – are you dreaming at night of old friends, family, lovers, boyfriends, girlfriends?  Any unfinished business being wrapped up?  This is the energetic equivalent of a warm reboot and your relationship to everything that has happened in the past, your energetic and emotional relationship to all things will be shifted on some level.  You may just feel a sense of release or letting go, a sense of peace for that friend or your ex for whom there was some left over stuff. This may be followed by pain and discomfort in the thoracic spine (over the heart region), crying unexpectedly or feeling moved to tears, or pain in the low back and hips (root chakra or family - how we ground into the earth has moved).

Let us be grateful for the souls in Haiti who agreed to hold this space for us to continue our growth process, and perhaps now a measure of peace and healing can finally come to this tiny nation who has continued to survive while in the midst of tremendous corruption and so little support. 

Resolutions Schmesolutions (1/06/2010)

See if you can pronounce that 5 times fast.

Now well into the second week of the new year and not having written a word for well over a month may not be a good start to the new year.  Wanting to explore the idea of new years resolutions about health and how to make them palatable.  Did you know that for 7/10 people include weight loss and exercise and other health related items as part of their new years resolutions?  I am certainly no exception (although I did have a couple of golden years right before I went into private practice where I sort of gave up the ghost on that). 

But what to do when you don’t like veggies, are gluten free and (this one generously donated by the mother of one of my Mexican friends) thus will never enjoy connubial bliss due to my lack in the culinary area, particularly my inability to make (or eat for that matter) tortillas or tamales. 

I have always included health-related things as part of my new years resolutions, usually something like I will exercise more, take more yoga classes, lose the last 8 pounds of the 35 I put on my first couple years of practice, and the piece de resistance, run a half marathon (my secret desire to no longer look like a shar-pei in a bikini).  Forget about the fact that running is torture.  Plain and simple, work.  Not fun. No play,  No way.  (Not like tennis which has all sorts of opportunities for bullet-like profanity and hitting things with a resounding smack).

And what about my resolution to actually learn how to cook?  Smitten as I’m sure thousands are by Julie/Julia, and infatuated with the idea of actually figuring out how to make Beef Bourguignon and that in this was might secure lasting happiness of the culinary kind, how does 4 pounds of butter weekly and TONS of cow coincide with my health?  And let’s not forget the fact that as a reformed vegetarian, I never quite got the meat thing down. I am 0/5 with meat dishes for my friends, now relegated to salads and appetizers like cream cheese stuffed in salami or whatever will sit on a Ritz.   Add to that a near obsession for researching new trends in nutrition and Joel Fuhrman’s humorless assertion that we should all be strict vegans, with not even olive oil to keep us company (Eat to Live). [Brrr, it's cold in that oil-free world].

Well, I began my journey into the notion of cooking SOMETHING by going to the bookstore and actually looking at Julia Child’s book, and I am happy to say that it looks like my 1963 Edition of Stryer (Biochem) and pretty much reads like my Pchem text.  And who Knew her Beef Bourguignon used BACON (she lost me right there).   Happily, this puts to rest my brief infatuation of cooking a la Julia, (and hosting Texas hold em nights with lovely French food).  My thighs are thanking me already and I truly believe this was the intervention of a higher power.  (Now if only I can break up with cheese).

Strangely enough though, it has brought me back into the kitchen, and I realize belatedly that while my culinary skills are lacking  in the animal department, I have a certain talent for vegetables.  You see (and I am outing myself to patients here) I really don’t like them very much.  (I know – shock and betrayal)   I am a meat and potatoes girl at heart (sadly having given up any wheat laced pasta long ago).  But since one of my resolutions is to move to a more plant based diet, which includes wholesome foods that I actually COOK (note to readers:  my specialty to date is salad.  I KNOW, but really great salads).  And I am discovering that I have a certain talent for disguising vegetables so that they don’t really seem so much like vegetables (we can thank my travels in Italy– and no I do not mean they are covered in red tomato sauce ala the Cowboy curry my ex used to make (don’t ask). 

So how do we make our new year's resolutions palatable?  Regardless of our resolutions, they have to be pleasurable on some level, tasty, playful, a joy, or we just won’t do them.  So whether yours is to spend 1-2 days a week walking more, or not eating junk food, or visiting your acupuncturist more (wink),  or not getting angry over things you cannot control (#5 on my list),  they need to be realistic, kind (to ourselves and others – I mean it just would not do to abandon the family nightly to hang with the personal trainer) and fun.  We spend enough time “should-ing” ourselves as it is. 

So tonight, I made a large pot of broccoli soup, and sautéed a bunch of veggies in lemon and cilantro with parmesan to have over greens I grew in my community garden.  It was good day,  and already that’s better than anything I did last year in the kitchen.   (OK if you think about it I have no where to go but up].  Maybe that’s my theme – for most of us, pick on or two small things – walk 10 minutes a day, go to bed 30 minutes earlier, get body work once a month.  These are doable, and will build on themselves.

And hopefully by the end of the year we will be able to button out trousers while standing up...