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.

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...

There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio....

Welcome back to another edition of AcuNut's Health Watch.

In the midst of the ever-present debate about the national health care system, I felt the need to explore the idea of health and healing as a commodity in our society, the notion that health and healing can be packaged and bought.   The baby boomers are beginning to hit their "senior" birthdays, and have been raised in a culture where technology and the advances in medicine seemingly had no limits, particularly with the miracles of vaccines and antibiotics.  Add to that the introduction of the HMO and the idea of a $10 copay and we have a fundamental shift with regards to personal responsibility, and a relinqushing of personal power over to HMOs.   In bygone days, when health care was less ubiquitous and not readily paid for (or you had a high deductible), I think more emphasis as placed on prevention - stay home when you are sick, eat your vegetables, have 2 prunes a day, the daily constitutional, and my personal favorite - nap time (so civilized).  In addition people had to save for their annual deductibles, and this could be a few thousand dollars annually.  There was, on some level, an understanding that health care was part of the family budget.

The fundamental health crises in our country may be less about the ability for us to save lives or even prevent disease then it is about personal responsibility, about being proactive with your health and not necessarily accepting the MD's word as final or the only option.   Technology has a price, not only in $$ but in quality of life. The basics of preventive medicine have been sacrificed to feed the beast of technology because insurance companies cannot afford to pay doctors for the time it takes to council patients. It is quicker to just give them the little purple pill and move on. And the pharmaceutical companies will make far more $$ from you as a diabetic over 25 years than if you use diet and exercises.  There is no financial incentive for wellness as a culture at present in the US.

As an ancillary provider (alternative to conventional medicine such as chiro, acupuncture, naturopathic, massage, etc.) many times I see patients only after they have had their condition for months or years, have tried multiple trips to the doctor, and been put on a potent mix of medications.  If there was one message I could impart to the general public, it would be to seek help sooner, that they have the means to live a pain-free or more energetic life, the downside being that they may have to pay for some of it outside of their conventional medicine. 

As to the arguments that these modalities have not been "scientifically proven"  I would encourage people to become their own scientists with regards to their bodies.  The advantage of working with a licensed and credentialed provider of alternative medicine is that you will experience far fewer side effects or  permanent injury than with many conventional therapies, particularly drugs.  (It may come as a shock to many people that in the Physician's Desk reference, that for over half the meds, they don't understand the mechanism of action, which is med speak for they don't know how the drugs work in the body.  This may also explain why they cannot explain the side affects associated with the drugs).

In general, with a provider with whom you have a poor fit, or with whom you have a bad exeprience you will just not get better rather than experience lasting harm.  I have seen quite a few lame ducks in my own journey to wellness.  Although it seemed like wasted money at the time,  my experience has been that with persistence I eventually am lead to a great provider, one with whom I have a good rapport.  Trial and error is part of the scientific process.  

The Journey of a thousand miles....
begins with one step.   I had a teacher who likened the search for the right provider to a pilgrimage of sorts - a refining process that happens when we become willing to search for our recovery and perhaps to go to any lengths to get better.  She likened it to a sword being tempered by fire, sharpened, the blade made perfect.  Furthermore, the journey to health is seldom simple because we are often unclear in our intentions.  While we may want this or that to be "fixed,"  sometimes we are not ready to work our side of the street, to take the steps to achieve health.   The journey, the longing for recovery is sharpened by the suffering,  and we find our ego being whittled away in the process, creating an energetic opening through which grace can pass.  For me, the search created willingness to do what was asked, perhaps to abstain from certain foods, to exercise more, meditate, to take foul tasting herbs.     

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." (Hamlet Act 1, scene 5, 159–167).

Perhaps it was my background as a research scientist that caused me to look outside the box when confronted with my own health care crises back in the 80s, where the answers I heard from my primary care didn't work for me and neither did the idea of taking Vicodin for the rest of my life or walking with a cane.  It took several years to find a combo of modalities that worked and then several years of treatment before things were a lot better.  Have I been cured?  Gosh no, I manage the structural issues by regular bodywork and I have to budget accordingly, because like many of you, my insurance does not cover ANY of my ancillary services. 

Given that I have spent the better part of the down-payment on a house on my health in the last decade, you may want to ask if it was worth the investment...  Absolutely.  And now when there are periodic flare-ups - and trust me, at least once a year I manage to mangle myself pretty badly to where I am laid up again and I have to get a lot more bodywork ($$), at least now I know how and what to do.  That may be the biggest difference with my clients is that I know with certainty that within a few months things will be better.  It is an empowering thing to feel like I have a choice, that I am not locked into the HMO having the last word, that I can make my own choices with regards to my health care as an educated consumer. 

Consider that no treatment or practitioner can fix you - all physicians, no matter what style of medicine they practice, merely help make it possible for your body to heal.  With the health care consuming a great deal of the airwaves at present, it might be a helpful to consider what aspects of our health we would like to improve in 2010 and what we are able and willing to pay for that care. 

Contact me directly at jmoffitt@acunut.com.

Qi Cultivation (2/3): The New Paradigm of Body and Mind

Ok so in our last letter I mentioned PNI - becasue the medical effects of the mind and emotions are much deeper than just stress, or depression. In order to illustrate this I am going to introduce a fairly new field of medicine:  
Psychoneuro-immunology (PNI)… a mouthful to say the least, and it is helpful to break up the word into it’s component parts:

• Psyche - the mind component or study of psychology, the cognitive and emotional processes involving mood states.
• Neuro - the neurological connections e.g. neurotransmitters and neuroendocrine secretions, or study of neurology
• Immunology - how the immune system e.g. the cellular and humeral components are impacted, or the study of immunology.

The study of the interaction of behavioral, neural, and endocrine factors and the functioning of the immune system. (3) 

 The study of interactions, bidirectional communication occurring between behavior, brain, the immune and endocrine systems. (4)

 My personal favorite was from Dr. Kirsti Dyer’s website on Transitional Medicine: PNI is an interdisciplinary science that studies the interrelationships between psychological, behavioral, neuroendocrine processes and immunology. (2) 

PNI includes the effect of the mind and emotions on the immune system. We have Dr. Candice Pert to thank for her discovery of the opiate receptor in cell biology (a basic receptor responsible for the pleasure principle and my lingering addiction to chocolate). Basically PNI is extremely new, looking to discover how the body-mind-emotions affect cell repair, regulation, communication, protein synthesis – all things which we now understand affect qi production. Finally! A Medical paradigm that includes what Traditional Chinese Medicine has observed for several thousand years.

Cells are repaired and regulated at different rates depending upon the type of cell - epithelia in the digestive lining live a couple of days, skin cells, three weeks; red blood cells 120 days, and bone cells, several years. Dying cells are replaced with newly formed cells, a process known as cell turnover. (5) As you may have already guessed, the strength and speed by which cells are repaired depend upon the raw materials that we provide for it (diet, cellular nutition, sleep), and how effectively the body is able to make that repair (bodywork, sleep). However, what you may not know is that the cells are bathed in neuropeptides, hormones, protein fragments, and enzymes that all dictate how well we metabolize our food, the strength of our immune system, inflammatory processes in the body. They are dramatically affected by our emotions because of the chemical messengers released during certain emotional states (e.g. prostaglandins, cortisol, adrenaline). Someone who lives in chronic fear, worry, or stress bathes their cells in a very different chemical environment than someone who meditates every day in a cave, or who gets to run and play on a daily basis; they have a different cellular environment to show for it. Added up over time, these micro-changes play a much larger role for things like cell-to-cell communication, fertility, metabolism.

The time needed for cell reproduction and repair is one of the fundamental reasons that chronic disease and pain are not healed quickly – this is something I have to explain constantly to patients. It takes time for the cells to repair themselves, and a long period of proper nutrients, rest, exercise, bodywork to support the healing process. As we have stated before, even if it seems like it happened overnight, unless you were in an accident, it didn’t. And it takes time for the body to heal. The hardest part of my job is when a patient leaves before the miracle happens, or who absolutely won’t take any action to help support this process on their own. For them, at most all I can do is make them comfortable a few days a week.

Not surprisingly then, our emotions are a reflection of our cellular health and well-being. At some point in the not too distant future, they will be able to predict with some certainty the chemical effects that the various emotions have on the immune system.

  In future columns we will cover more about the TCM approach to the mind and emotions and how they affect the physical organs. For now I want to make a pitch to include some of the following activities in your self-care routine and briefly explain why.  (See 3/3)

 © Copyright 2003 - 2009 Jennifer Moffitt, Healing Arts Center Press, and AcuNut.com. All rights reserved.

Back to Basics

Welcome to another issue of AcuNut's Health Watch.  I had the good fortune last night after work to go for a walk out in the canyons near my home. It was a cooler than usual fall day, and it felt like fall for the first time.  (Living in San Diego, sometimes we have to hunt for changes of season).    While pondering the onset of winter, aka the loss of my flip flops, I started to think more specifically about yin-yang balance and how that changes the treatment principle for my patients. 

Yin and Yang are the basis of Oriental medicine, a fundamental subdivision that the early Chinese scholars used to try and describe the nature of the universe.  Yin is everything that is cool, and moist, water, black, night, winter, nourishing, calm, and immobile. Yang, on the other hand, is the pure fire element: warm, moving, summer, upward, vibrant, and energetic. Everything in the universe breaks down into the balance between yin and yang. Nothing is firmly one or the other - there is always a small element of yin within the yang, and a small element of yang within the yin.

While Oriental medicine can seem foreign in the beginning, the basis of the medicine is really about restoring this intrinsic balance within the body.  For those who suffer from chronic pain or illness, the change of seasons is a great time to work on resolving their conditions. Spring and summer are about nature's increasing yang: flowers begin to bloom, gardens grow, and there are more daylight hours. The yang energy is moving up and out as growth and development. In winter, the yang energy dives deep into the body, the plants go to sleep (hopefully not in our winter garden though), and there is a hunkering down, a turning inward to rest and rejuvenate.  We are not separate from this process - this eb and flow happens in us as well, and a skilled practitioner knows how to use this flow to reinforce the healing process.


What is the Flow?
In my practice, it seems like returning patient to the flow includes a lot of the basics, things like your breath, sleep, food, poop (OK no laughing matter when you have a client who has been constipated for 10 years, or diarrhea for 20).   The flow is simple, simple, simple.

For many of us, going "back to basics"  is too simple. We like things complex and multi-layered. Our lifestyles move at a hectic pace, supported by technology so fast we can barely keep up. We are used to having the world at our fingertips - all the answers to our problems merely a "Google-click" away, even on the phone.  Somehow, it feels like we have lost touch with the process, the quality of the journey itself.  Something to consider:  Perhaps that techonology that allows us to blast off to the moon via our smartphones isn't so great if we are constipated when we get there. 

We want medicine to be magical.  Our over-reliance on pharmaceuticals and technology has created a false picture about the body and the healing process in general. Everything should be quick and easily diagnosed.  Hollywood shows like ER and Grey's have only reinforced this notion, luring us to think everything should be neatly resolved in a one-hour segment, (and that we should look good while doing it).

Interesting that no one on these shows ever has a chronic degenerative problem that is difficult to diagnose or smelly - intractable diarrhea or bloating. It's always the cool flashy stuff, multiple organ transplants, racing with the little refrigerated lunchbox through the hospital in the nick of time…

But the advances in science and medicine have not translated to better health or a better quality of life; in fact, many of us feel worse than ever before. We are a nation struggling with obesity. Endocrine, autoimmune, and cardiovascular disorders are widespread. Chronic degenerative conditions like Alzheimer's are on the rise, and almost 10% of our children have been diagnosed with attention deficit or behavioral disorders.  The US ranks 30th in the world for infant mortality, largely due to high rates of pre-term babies.  MAny many people drowning under the weight of poly-pharmacy, taking meds that supress a symptom but do nothing to cure them.  Why has science failed us?

What if it hasn't?   What if we have just forgotten the basics, the abc's of good health?  I think the dazzling power of emergency medicine has blinded us to the subtle (and even obvious) signs of a body moving out of balance, of impending illness or injury.  Then, when we fail to overcome that bad cold, or the back pain becomes chronic,  it's a mystery.  


Stay tuned as we start to explore the Basics of Preventive Medicine and good health.  Yours in health, Jen