Acupuncture actually works - placebo, fake and real, more studies needed for ancient medical therapy

The jury is still out.  Eastern medicine and therapies differ from the approach taken by modern medicine.  


So far clinical studies have limited by numbers of subjects and types of illness. 


There are few double blind tests undertaken to rule out or measure the extent of placebo and medical efficacy. 


Few researches bother to track the longer term effects of "placebo" and the progress of patients with chronic diseases.


Not enough studies have been done. Sceptics should learn about acupuncture before jumping to conclusions yet.


Decoding Ancient Therapy


Acupuncture has long baffled medical experts and no wonder: It holds that an invisible life force called qi (pronounced chee) travels up and down the body in 14 meridians. Illness and pain are due to blockages and imbalances in qi. Inserting thin needles into the body at precise points can unblock the meridians, practitioners believe, and treat everything from arthritis and asthma to anxiety, acne and infertility.

As fanciful as that seems, acupuncture does have real effects on the human body, which scientists are documenting using high-tech tools. Neuroimaging studies show that it seems to calm areas of the brain that register pain and activate those involved in rest and recuperation. Doppler ultrasound shows that acupuncture increases blood flow in treated areas. Thermal imaging shows that it can make inflammation subside.

Scientists are also finding parallels between the ancient concepts and modern anatomy. Many of the 365 acupuncture points correspond to nerve bundles or muscle trigger points. Several meridians track major arteries and nerves. "If people have a heart attack, the pain will radiate up across the chest and down the left arm. That's where the heart meridian goes," says Peter Dorsher, a specialist in pain management and rehabilitation at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. "Gallbladder pain will radiate to the right upper shoulder, just where the gallbladder meridian goes."

Many medical experts remain deeply skeptical about acupuncture, of course, and studies of its effectiveness have been mixed. "Something measurable is happening when you stick a needle into a patient—that doesn't impress me at all," says Edzard Ernst, a professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter in England and co-author of the book, "Trick or Treatment." Acupuncture "clearly has a very strong placebo effect. Whether it does anything else, the jury is still out."

Even so, the use of acupuncture continues to spread—often alongside conventional medicine. U.S. Navy, Air Force and Army doctors are using acupuncture to treat musculoskeletal problems, pain and stress in stateside hospitals and combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Delegations from Acupuncturists Without Borders are holding communal ear-needling sessions to reduce stress among earthquake victims in Haiti. Major medical centers—from M.D. Anderson in Houston to Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York—use acupuncture to counteract the side effects of chemotherapy.

In a 2007 survey, 3.2 million Americans had undergone acupuncture in the past year—up from 2.1 million in 2001, according to the government's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

The most common uses are for chronic pain conditions like arthritis, lower back pain and headaches, as well as fatigue, anxiety and digestive problems, often when conventional medicine fails. At about $50 per session, it's relatively inexpensive and covered by some insurers.

It is also generally safe. About 10% of patients experience some bleeding at the needle sites, although in very rare cases, fatalities have occurred due to infections or injury to vital organs, mostly due to inexperienced practitioners.

Most states require that acupuncturists be licensed, and the Food and Drug Administration requires that needles be new and sterile.

Diagnoses are complicated. An acupuncturist will examine a patient's tongue and take three different pulses on each wrist, as well as asking questions about digestion, sleep and other habits, before determining which meridians may be blocked and where to place the needles. The 14 meridians are thought to be based on the rivers of China, and the 365 points may represent the days of the year. "Invaders" such as wind, cold, heat, dampness, dryness factor into illness, so can five phases known as fire, earth, metal, water and wood.

"It's not like there's a Merck Manual for acupuncture," says Joseph M. Helms, who has trained some 4,000 physicians in acupuncture at his institute in Berkeley, Calif. "Every case is evaluated on an individual basis, based on the presentation of the patient and the knowledge of the acupuncturist."

Dr. Helms notes that Western doctors also examine a patient's tongue for signs of illness. As for qi, he says, while the word doesn't exist in Western medicine, there are similar concepts. "We'll say, 'A 27-year-old female appears moribund; she doesn't respond to stimuli. Or an 85-year old woman is exhibiting a vacant stare.' We're talking about the same energy and vitality, we're just not making it a unique category that we quantify."

Studies in the early 1980s found that acupuncture works in part by stimulating the release of endorphins, the body's natural feel-good chemicals, much like vigorous exercise does. Now, a growing body of research suggests that it may have several mechanisms of action. Those include stimulating blood flow and tissue repair at the needle sites and sending nerve signals to the brain that regulate the perception of pain and reboot the autonomic nervous system, which governs unconscious functions such as heart beat, respiration and digestion, according to Alejandro Elorriaga, director of the medical acupuncture program at McMaster University in Ontario, which teaches a contemporary version to physicians. 

"You can think Western, you can think Eastern. As long as your needle goes to the nerve, you will get some effect," Dr. Elorriaga says.

What's more, an odd phenomenon occurs when acupuncture needles are inserted into the body and rotated: Connective tissue wraps around them like spaghetti around a fork, according to ultrasound studies at the University of Vermont. Helene Langevin, research associate professor of neurology, says this action stretches cells in the connective tissue much like massage and yoga do, and may act like acupuncture meridians to send signals throughout the body. "That's what we're hoping to study next," she says.

Meanwhile, neuroimaging studies at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have shown that acupuncture affects a network of systems in the brain, including decreasing activity in the limbic system, the emotional part of the brain, and activating it in the parts of the brain that typically light up when the brain is at rest.

Other studies at the Martinos Center have shown that patients with carpal tunnel syndrome, a painful compression of nerves in the wrist, have heightened activity in parts of the brain that regulate sensation and fear, but after acupuncture, their brain patterns more closely resemble those of healthy subjects. Brain scans of patients with fibromyalgia show that both acupuncture and sham acupuncture (using real needles on random points in the body) cause the release of endorphins. But real acupuncture also increased the number of receptors for pain-reducing neurotransmitters, bringing patients even more relief.

The fact that many patients get some relief and register some brain changes from fake acupuncture has caused controversy in designing clinical trials. Some critics say that proves that what patients think of as benefit from acupuncture is mainly the placebo effect. Acupuncture proponents counter that placebos that too closely mimic the treatment experience may have a real benefit.

"I don't see any disconnect between how acupuncture works and how a placebo works," says radiologist Vitaly Napadow at the Martinos center. "The body knows how to heal itself. That's what a placebo does, too."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704841304575137872667749264.html

More readings :

http://www.healthandgoodness.com/article/acupuncture-placebo-effect.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/8168134/Acupunctures-effect-isnt-just-psychological.html

China's latest Hormone Milk Scandal Update

Following the major upheaval over domestically manufactured melamine tainted milk powder in 2008, recent news reports are not more platable to consumers. 

China's Health Ministry orders probe into milk powder hormone claims. 

Parents and doctors in Hubei were reported earlier this month voicing fears that milk powder produced by Syrutra had caused at least three infant girls to develop prematurely.

Ministry spokesman Deng Haihua said at a regular press conference that food safety authorities were already testing samples of milk powder made by Syrutra, a dairy company set up in Qingdao, a coastal city in east China's Shandong Province, in 1998.

Causes for sexual prematurity of children were complicated and could be caused by a wide range of factors, and experts had no way to definitely determine if food or environmental factors were involved yet, he said.
Deng said a 2008 regulation banned sales and reproduction of products made from livestock under the influence of drugs, or those failing to pass health and quarantine inspection standards.

He said estrogen hormones were forbidden in milk powder products and the Ministry of Agriculture had formulated test procedures for estrogen hormones and had provided them to Hubei authorities.

Syrutra's stock prices at Nasdaq fell by almost 27 percent on Monday.
The statement said it was "unscientific and unreasonable for some media to blame premature puberty on the milk formula."

Syrutra's claim was backed by some experts.

Yao Hui, deputy head of the endocrine department of Wuhan Children's Hospital, said among the latest cases treated for the condition at the hospital, three of the four children had never eaten baby formula made by Syrutra. The other baby used to eat Syrutra formula, but switched to other brands last year.


Unlike the melamine case, dairy companies would gain no commercial benefit from adding hormones to its products, Monday's Beijing Times quoted Wang as saying.

But that did not make the milk formula hormone-free, Wang said, adding the substance might have entered the food chain when cattle were reared by farmers.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-08/10/c_13438812.htm

Owing to the benefit of its quick modernisation, surely China could learn from past mistakes and skip the scandals that plagued the USA milk industry in the last century.

The Birth of America’s Dairy Industry

During the early years of commercial dairy production in the US, most dairies were in cities - and they were filthy. Stables held up to 2,000 cows that were fed the waste residues from grain used in nearby liquor distilleries and breweries. The milk produced by these urban dairies was known as “swill milk,” which would later be referred to by historians as “white poison.”

Because of the close relationship between alcohol production and swill dairies, some of the first reformers to call for stricter standards in the dairy industry were the anti-alcohol temperance groups. These early reformers pushed for the importation of “country milk” into the cities, taking advantage of new railroads and other transportation improvements. v Milk was transported into the cities by rail, but because it was transported without refrigeration, it was no healthier than swill milk.

The High Price of Factory Farmed Milk

With each passing year, more small to mid-sized dairy farmers go out of business. Worn down by production costs that always go up and income that is unpredictable at best, dairymen and women who have been in the business for generations are calling it quits, and are selling off their herds to corporate operations or selling their land for development. Others have tried to adapt by getting big instead of getting out—increasing production through the use of artificial hormones, antibiotics, and highly-concentrated feed, and moving cows off pasture and into large confinement facilities.

Meanwhile, consumers are buying low-quality milk that is potentially harmful to their health. The only winners in this system are the dairy corporations that are willing to go to great lengths to cut costs and increase profit, regardless of the consequences for consumers, animals and the environment.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/dairy/

Breeding, Artificial Hormones and Feed

Because it’s cheaper to produce more milk from fewer cows (smaller herds require less space, feed and other inputs), the corporate dairy industry aims to maximize efficiency by increasing the amount of milk that each cow produces. As a result, the use of breeding, feeding inputs and new technology led to a quadrupling of the average amount of milk produced per dairy cow between 1950 and 2005.

With the invention of artificial insemination, farmers have been able to take tight control over the breeding and genetic makeup of their dairy herds. Using this technology, a single bull may sire tens of thousands of cows, thus minimizing the diversity of the dairy cow gene pool.

Not only are cows bred to produce maximum quantities of milk, their feed consists of fat, energy, and protein-rich grains to increase milk production and replace the energy lost by giving off such large quantities of milk. However, since cows are naturally grass-eaters, they develop digestive problems when they feed on primarily grains like corn and soy. xxi But perhaps the most drastic measure that dairies take to boost milk production is the use of artificial growth hormones such as rBGH - said to increase per-cow milk yield by 10-15 percent.

All of these practices do not only result in health problems in cows, they may also be dangerous to humans that consume their milk.

Food Safety - Chinese authorities must clamp down on unsafe

Food hygiene and safety have beeen serious concerns in a massive country where some immoral and ignorant businesses have exploited loopholes and cause detriment to human lives.  A country can only be strong if its citizens are of good health - both physical and soul.  What is the point of showing off achievements in technology, economics and space when harm is done to the people on earth.


It may be theoretically and scientifically plausible to make of recycled human protein waste but to use hair in food is yucks!  The rumour about extracting amino acids from human hair for fermenting soy beans to make soy sauce has been around for a while. It was not until recently that the authorities have stepped up efforts to close down such factories and punish the perpetrators. Other negative publicity have been made of fake eggs and plastic milk.  In the latter, the victims are babies! More action needs to be done and quickly to prevent more innocent people from falling sick.

Interfax reports that media exposure has forced the government to respond to a scandal about soy sauce that was being made from human hair:

"The Chinese government has shown an unusually high level of concern as a result of a bold media exposure towards a scandal in which human hair was used to make soy sauce. The government has now ordered an immediate inspection of all domestic food seasoning plants before the end of January.

China Central Television (CCTV), the state television station, first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China's Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce.

Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce."

http://www.danwei.org/internet/soy_sauce_made_from_human_hair.php