Acupuncture - The Oldest Health Care System in the World

The origins of acupuncture in China can be traced back at least 2000 years, making it one of the oldest and most long-standing health care systems in the world. Today, acupuncture is an effective, natural and increasingly popular form of health care that is being used by people from a wide range of cultural and social backgrounds.

Acupuncture is a time-honoured medicine and takes a holistic approach to understanding normal function and disease processes and focuses as much on the prevention of illness as on the treatment.

What is qi & how does it affect the body?
When healthy, an abundant supply of qi (pronounced chee) or "life energy" flows through the body's meridians (a network of invisible channels through the body). If the flow of qi in the meridians becomes blocked or there is an inadequate supply of qi, then the body fails to maintain harmony, balance and order, and disease or illness follows. This can result from stress, overwork, poor diet, disease pathogens, weather and environmental conditions, and other lifestyle factors and becomes evident to TCM practitioners through observable signs of bodily dysfunction. TCM practitioners look carefully for these signs of health and dysfunction, paying particular attention not only to the presenting signs and symptoms, but also to the medical history, general constitution, and the pulse and tongue.

How does acupuncture work?
Acupuncture treatment involves the insertion of fine, sterile needles into specific sites (acupuncture points) along the body's meridians to clear energy blockages and encourage the normal flow of qi through the individual. The practitioner may also stimulate the acupuncture points using other methods, including moxibustion, cupping, laser therapy, electro-stimulation and massage, in order to re-establish the flow of qi.

As a natural form of healing, acupuncture has the following benefits:

• provides drug-free pain relief
• effectively treats a wide range of acute and chronic ailments
• treats the underlying cause of disease and illness as well as the symptoms
• provides an holistic approach to the treatment of disease and illness, linking body, mind and emotions
• assists in the prevention against disease and illness as well as the maintenance of general well-being

Acupuncture is known to treat a wide range of disorders including:

• Neurological conditions such as headaches, migraines, difficulty sleeping, nervous tension, stroke, some forms of deafness, facial and inter-costal neuralgia, trigeminal neuralgia, some forms of paralysis, sequelae of poliomyelitis, peripheral neuropathy, noises in the ears, dizziness, and Meniere's disease.
   
• Cardiovascular disorders such as high or low blood pressure, fluid retention, chest pain, angina pectoris, poor circulation, cold hands and feet, and muscle cramps.
   
• Respiratory conditions such as bronchial asthma, acute and chronic bronchitis, acute tonsillitis, rhinitis, sinusitis, hay fever, chronic cough, laryngitis, sore throat, influenza and the common cold.
   
• Digestive system disorders such as toothache, post-extraction pain, gingivitis, mouth ulcers, hiccough, spasms of the oesophagus, gastric and duodenal ulcers, gastric hyperacidity, gastritis, heartburn, hiatus hernia syndrome, flatulence, paralytic ileus, colitis, diarrhoea, constipation, haemorrhoids, liver and gall bladder disorders, and weight control.
   
• Urogenital disorders such as cystitis, prostatitis, orchitis, low sexual vitality, urinary retention, kidney disorders, nocturnal enuresis, and neurogenic bladder dysfunction.
   
• Gynaecological and obstetric disorders such as premenstrual tension, painful, heavy or irregular, or the absence of periods, abnormal uterine bleeding or discharge, hormonal disturbances, disorders associated with menopause, prolapse of the uterus or bladder, difficulty with conception, and morning sickness.mu
   
• Skin conditions such as eczema, dermatitis, psoriasis, nerve rash, herpes zoster, acne, scar tissue and resultant adhesions, hair loss and dandruff.
   
• Eye conditions such as visual disorders, red, sore, itchy or watery eyes, conjunctivitis, simple cataracts, myopia in children, and central retinitis.
   
• Musculoskeletal disorders such as osteoarthritis, sciatica, lumbago, weak back, low back pain, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, tenosynovitis, shoulder and neck pain, cervicobrachial syndrome, 'frozen shoulder', and 'tennis elbow'.
   
• Sporting injuries such as sprained ankles and knees, cartilage problems, corking and tearing of muscles, torn ligaments and bruises.
   
• Psychological conditions such as depression, phobias, emotional disturbances, anxiety, nervousness and addictions such as smoking.

* The disorders above which appear in bold have been recognised by the World Health Organisation (December 1979) as having been successfully treated by acupuncture. The disorders which do not appear in bold above are other common disorders which have been found to respond well to acupuncture.

This article originally appeared on http://www.acupuncture.org.au

Piriformis Syndrome - Help Yourself Out of Pain

 

A Special Article by our Guest Blogger Martin of Always Fysio from the Netherlands. Be sure to check out his website www.alwaysfysio.nl

Piriformis syndrome: Treatment in 4 weeks with 3 exercises

The piriformis syndrome is a very limiting injury which can take months to recover if you don’t treat it right.

Luckily for you, we’ve found a way to treat your piriformis syndrome the right way. And we’ll learn you exactly how to do it yourself.

Your piriformis syndrome will go away!

Also I’ll try to answer the most Frequently Asked Questions about piriformis syndrome.

So keep on reading.

1. What is the piriformis syndrome?
2. What are piriformis syndrome symptoms?
3. What causes piriformis syndrome?
4. How long does piriformis syndrome last?
5. How can I do a piriformis syndrome test myself?
6. Which piriformis syndrome treatment can I do myself?
7. What can and can’t I do with a piriformis syndrome?
8. Frequently asked questions about piriformis syndrome

What is the piriformis syndrome?

The piriformis syndrome is a neurological injury. It’s caused by the compression of the sciatic nerve.

To understand the mechanism behind the piriformis syndrome, you’ll have to know the anatomy of your gluteal region.

Your sciatic nerve runs from your back through the backside of your leg all the way to your foot. It controls the muscles at the back of your leg and your foot. It also innervates the skin of your leg, so you can feel touch.

In your pelvic region, the sciatic nerve is covered by the piriformis muscle. The piriformis muscle originates from your sacrum and SI-joint. It attaches at the other side of your hip to the greater trochanter at the outer side of your tigh bone.

The function of your piriformis muscle is to rotate your leg to the outer side when you lift it behind you extended. It also abducts your leg when you lift it flexed in front of you. This means that your bodyweight shifts more to the middle. If this didn’t happen you would be out of balance and not able to walk. (foto maken van de beweging ter verduidelijking)

Piriformis syndrome is also known as “wallet sciatica” or “fat wallet syndrome,” as the condition can be caused or aggravated by sitting with a large wallet in the affected side’s rear pocket.

What are piriformis syndrome symptoms?

There are two main symptoms that can point you towards a piriformis syndrome. We’ll discuss both of them and explain why they appear.

The first and most pronounced symptom is buttocks pain. The pain is caused by overuse of your piriformis muscle. This overuse damages the muscle, causing it to tighten.

Because the piriformis muscle tightens, it puts pressure on the sciatic nerve. This nerve runs below the piriformis muscle. The pressure causes irritation of the sciatic nerve. This irritation causes a radiating pain at the back side of your leg. This pain can go down your leg as far as your calf muscle. This is the second sign you can recognize a piriformis syndrome of.

What causes piriformis syndrome?

The main cause of the piriformis syndrome is overuse of the piriformis muscle. Overuse can be caused by different activities.

Bending and getting up many times in a short period of time.

The muscles in your buttocks help you to get up after bending down, like when you work in the garden.

Imagine you’re in your garden removing the weeds. You bend over and pick up one weed at the time. After an hour or two you’ve bend and got up many times. Each time you get up, you use your piriformis muscle. So you can imagine that after two hours your piriformis muscle is used a lot.

If it’s trained regularly this is not a problem.

It’s like working out in the gym. When you do it for the first time or not very regularly, you’ll have a big chance to injury yourself during your training. But if you train four times a week, it’s very unlikely that you will get an injury.. So if your piriformis is trained well because you work in the garden all the time, it won’t be a problem. If you do it only occasionally, you’re more likely to injure yourself.

When you expect a baby you can expect a piriformis syndrome as well.

During pregnancy woman can experience the symptoms of a piriformis syndrome. This condition is called pregnancy sciatica. It’s the piriformis syndrome caused by pregnancy.

This is why it occurs:

During pregnancy woman obviously gain weight. This is of course a natural process. Unfortunately this also increases the pressure on your pelvic region.

Because of the weight, walking becomes harder. As mentioned before you use your piriformis muscle a lot when you walk. Because your weight increased, the muscle have to work harder when you walk. This causes it to tighten up and puts pressure on your sciatic nerve.

 The second contributing factor is an increase of laxity in your pelvic region. To prepare your body for the birth of your baby a special hormone is produced. It’s called the relaxin hormone and its purpose is to loosen up your ligaments. These ligaments normally keep your pelvic girdle together. When you give birth the baby needs to pass the pelvic girdle.

The hormone loosens up the ligaments that keep the different parts of your pelvic region together. This increases the space for the baby to pass through. One of the consequences is that your pelvic girdle muscles need to work harder to compensate the pelvic instability. This includes the piriformis muscle. Therefore chances are that you’ll overuse it, causing tension and compression of the sciatic nerve.

Fortunately the symptoms usually disappear by itself after the baby is born.

Hip pain, a stiff hip, hip arthritis and the piriformis syndrome

A stiff hip can also be a cause for the piriformis syndrome.

As mentioned before your piriformis muscle serves many of your hip movements. When you have a stiff hip the muscle have to work harder to move your hip because of bigger resistance. His will lead to overuse of the muscle resulting in the piriformis syndrome.

One of the main reasons for developing a stiff hip is hip arthritis. This means that the cartilages in your hip joint disappears. The lack of cartilage results in less mobility of your hip joint.

This is how hip arthritis can lead to a stiff hip resulting in the piriformis syndrome and hip pain.

How long does piriformis syndrome last?

Your piriformis syndrome can last for several months if you don’t treat it the right way. However, if you use the exercises we’ll describe later, it will only last for about 4 weeks.

In some severe cases, even with the right exercises it can take months to heal. This is usually because the piriformis syndrome is an outcome of another, bigger problem. In those cases you’ll have to solve the main problem before you can cure your piriformis syndrome.

How can I do a piriformis syndrome test myself?

What you’ve learned so far is what the symptoms of the piriformis syndrome are and what the main causes are. This will give you a pretty good indication already if you’re suffering of the piriformis syndrome yourself.

If you’re not sure yet there are a few simple tests that you can do yourself to find out if you have the piriformis syndrome yourself.

These tests look very similar to the exercises that you have to do to cure your piriformis syndrome.

The first indication that you have the piriformis syndrome is a tight buttocks. You can feel your piriformis muscle at the lower part of your buttocks, close to where your leg starts. You should feel a difference between your painful side and your healthy side. At the painfull side you should feel a tender point. This feels like a little ball and it hurts when you put pressure on it. On your healthy side this ball is absent.

The second indication is when you stretch your piriformis muscle.

This is how you can stretch your piriformis muscle. In this example we’ll stretch our left piriformis muscle:

• Grab your left knee with your left hand.
• Grab your left ankle with your right hand.
• Pull your left knee toward your right shoulder.
• Pull your left ankle also towards your right shoulder.

Our friend Martin has more to share! For More Info From His Article Visit: http://www.alwaysfysio.nl/en/piriformis-syndrome-treatment/

Why Lying Broken in a Pile on Your Bedroom Floor is a Good Idea.

The Goddess of never not broken.

You know that feeling when you have just gone through a breakup, or lost your job, and everything is terrible and terrifying and you don’t know what to do, and you find yourself crying in a pile on your bedroom floor, barely able to remember how to use the phone, desperately looking for some sign of God in old letters, or your Facebook newsfeed or on Glee, finding nothing there to comfort you?

Come on, yes you do. We all do.

And there is a goddess from Hindu mythology that teaches us that, in this moment, in this pile on the floor, you are more powerful than you’ve ever been.

This past week, I have been deeply inspired by a talk I heard on the Yoga Teacher Telesummit by Eric Stoneberg on this relatively unknown Goddess from Hindu mythology: Akhilandeshvari.

This figure has snuck up inside me and settled into my bones. She keeps coming out of my mouth every time I teach, and she’s given me so much strength and possibility during a time of change and uncertainty in my own life. I wanted to unpack a little bit about who she is for those that might be, like me, struggling a little bit in that pile on the floor and wondering how the hell to get up again.

The answer, it turns out, is this: in pieces, warrior-style, on the back of a crocodile. Yee ha.

Akhilandeshvari:

“Ishvari” in Sanskrit means “goddess” or “female power,” and the “Akhilanda” means essentially “never not broken.” In other words, The Always Broken Goddess. Sanskrit is a tricky and amazing language, and I love that the double negative here means that she is broken right down to her name.

But this isn’t the kind of broken that indicates weakness and terror.

It’s the kind of broken that tears apart all the stuff that gets us stuck in toxic routines, repeating the same relationships and habits over and over, rather than diving into the scary process of trying something new and unfathomable.

Akhilanda derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.

The thing about going through sudden or scary or sad transitions (like a breakup) is that one of the things you lose is your future: your expectations of what the story of your life so far was going to become. When you lose that partner or that job or that person, your future dissolves in front of you.

And of course, this is terrifying.

But look, Akhilanda says, now you get to make a choice. In pieces, in a pile on the floor, with no idea how to go forward, your expectations of the future are meaningless. Your stories about the past do not apply. You are in flux, you are changing, you are flowing in a new way, and this is an incredibly powerful opportunity to become new again: to choose how you want to put yourself back together. Confusion can be an incredible teacher—how could you ever learn if you already had it all figured out?

This goddess has another interesting attribute, which is, of course, her ride: a crocodile.

Crocodiles are interesting in two ways: Firstly, Stoneberg explains that the crocodile represents our reptilian brain, which is where we feel fear. Secondly, the predatory power of a crocodile is not located in their huge jaws, but rather that they pluck their prey from the banks of the river, take it into the water, and spin it until it is disoriented. They whirl that prey like a dervish seeking God, they use the power of spin rather than brute force to feed themselves.

By riding on this spinning, predatory, fearsome creature, Akhilanda refuses to reject her fear, nor does she let it control her. She rides on it. She gets on this animal that lives inside the river, inside the flow. She takes her fear down to the river and uses its power to navigate the waves, and spins in the never not broken water. Akhilanda shows us that this is beautiful. Stoneberg writes:

Akhilanda is also sometimes described in our lineage like a spinning, multi-faceted prism. Imagine the Hope Diamond twirling in a bright, clear light. The light pouring through the beveled cuts of the diamond would create a whirling rainbow of color. The diamond is whole and complete and BECAUSE it’s fractured, it creates more diverse beauty. Its form is a spectrum of whirling color.

That means that this feeling of confusion and brokenness that every human has felt at some time or another in our lives is a source of beauty and colour and new reflections and possibilities.

If everything remained the same, if we walked along the same path down to the river every day until there was a groove there (as we do; in Sanskrit this is called Samskara, habits or even “some scars”), this routine would become so limited, so toxic to us that, well, the crocs would catch on, and we’d get plucked from the banks, spun and eaten.

So now is the time, this time of confusion and brokenness and fear and sadness, to get up on that fear, ride it down to the river, dip into the waves, and let yourself break. Become a prism.

All the places where you’ve shattered can now reflect light and colour where there was none. Now is the time to become something new, to choose a new whole.

But remember Akhilanda’s lesson: even that new whole, that new, colourful, amazing groove that we create is an illusion. It means nothing unless we can keep on breaking apart and putting ourselves together again as many times as we need to.

We are already “never not broken.” We were never a consistent, limited whole. In our brokenness, we are unlimited.

And that means we are amazing.

This article originally appeared on elephantjournal.com & is written by Julie Peters

Carpal Tunnel Pain and How Acupuncture Helps

If you see someone wearing a wrist splint, it's likely due to carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). Many attribute the rise of CTS to poor computer ergonomics or uncomfortable body positioning for long hours.

Symptoms include hand weakness, numbness and/or tingling of thumb and fingers except the little finger, and pain from the wrist area throughout the palm side of your forearm.

The carpal tunnel is a tube bound by bones and ligaments in the wrist area on the palm side of the hand. It is roughly the diameter of the thumb, and it houses and channels the median nerve, veins, and tendons for hand and finger mobility.

Whether by physical forces or injury compressing the carpal tunnel or by internal neurological inflammation or damage, CTS amounts to a pinched median nerve, blood vessel, or tendon damage in the carpal tunnel.

Although similar symptoms to CTS may arise from different types of work with arms and hands poorly positioned, if those symptoms dissipate quickly and easily it's probably not CTS, at least it's not serious.

Simply taking breaks, and shaking your arms and hands, then re-positioning your hands, arms, and general posture better should keep you from needing medical intervention.

But if the symptoms persist away from the job or after long hours of typing, you should seek medical attention.
 

Conventional modalities of medical attention

Conventional medicine offers adjustable splints that can be taken off and on at will. Many CTS sufferers wear them during work, but wearing the splint during sleep is also recommended.

Non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are usually recommended. Some have to be prescribed while others can be purchased over the counter (OTC). These only relieve pain with side effects. Sometimes cortisone injections are used to relieve the pressure from swelling on the median nerve.

If these don't help enough, surgery is used. Endoscopic surgery, involving a narrow tube inserted into small incisions, is the least invasive. It's sometimes used for injured knees. Open surgery, as the name implies, is the most invasive, requiring more anesthesia.
 

Acupuncture - A non-pharmaceutical, non-surgical CTS intervention

Acupuncture, which works on the energy (chi) distribution along the body's mapped out meridians, has been used for centuries for both optimizing good health and reversing bad health, acute or chronic.

Lately, acupuncture has been used successfully for healing maladies from sports injuries. A dramatic example occurred just before the Super Bowl in 1986 when Chicago Bears controversial quarterback Jim McMahon underwent acupuncture treatments for a severely bruised back that wasn't responding to conventional treatment.

After his acupuncture treatments, Jim said he felt 200 percent better, and he and the Bears blew out the Patriots in that Super Bowl. This news event raised eyebrows among classic medical skeptics, spiking acupuncture's burgeoning public acceptance in America.

A recent acupuncture for CTS study by an Iranian university's neurological department was published in January 2012's Journal of Research in Medical Sciences as "Acupuncture in treatment of carpal tunnel syndrome: A randomized controlled trial study."

64 sufferers of moderate CTS were divided into a control group receiving vitamins B1 and B6 with fake acupuncture. The other group received two acupuncture treatments weekly over a four week period and wore wrist splints nightly.

Guess which group tested better neurologically and had lower GSS (global symptom scores) reported for pain, weakness, tingling, and numbness. Yep, the acupuncture guys, of course.

The researchers concluded: "Our findings indicated that the acupuncture can improve the overall subjective symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome and could be adopted in comprehensive care programs of these patients."

The complete study report is available in the sources below.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/carpal-tunnel-syndrome/DS00326

http://www.apnewsarchive.com

http://www.vitasearch.com/get-clp-summary/40537

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3523426/

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/038939_carpal_tunnel_acupuncture_treatment.html#ixzz40PI0IGZe