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Alternative Medecin

Last Updated (Saturday, 12 December 2009 11:01) Written by Administrator Monday, 26 October 2009 19:56

More than 80 million adults in the United States are estimated to use some form of alternative medicine, from herbs and megavitamins to yoga and acupuncture. But while sweeping claims are made for these treatments, the scientific evidence for them often lags far behind: studies and clinical trials, when they exist at all, can be shoddy in design and too small to yield reliable insights.

“The research has been making steady progress,” said Dr. Josephine P. Briggs, director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health. “It’s reasonably new that rigorous methods are being used to study these health practices.”

The need for rigor can be striking. For instance, a 2004 Harvard study identified 181 research papers on yoga therapy reporting that it could be used to treat an impressive array of ailments — including asthma, heart disease, hypertension, depression, back pain, bronchitis, diabetes, cancer, arthritis, insomnia, lung disease and high blood pressure.

It turned out that only 40 percent of the studies used randomized controlled trials — the usual way of establishing reliable knowledge about whether a drug, diet or other intervention is really safe and effective. In such trials, scientists randomly assign patients to treatment or control groups with the aim of eliminating bias from clinician and patient decisions.

Sat Bir S. Khalsa, the study’s author and a sleep researcher at the Harvard Medical School, said an added complication was that “the vast majority of these studies have been small,” averaging 30 or fewer subjects per arm of the randomized trial. The smaller the sample size, he warned, the greater the risk of error, including false positives and false negatives.

Critics of alternative medicine have seized on that weakness. R. Barker Bausell, a senior research methodologist at the University of Maryland and the author of “Snake Oil Science” (Oxford, 2007), says small studies often have a built-in conflict of interest: they need to show positive results to win grants for larger investigations.

“All these things conspire to produce false positives,” Dr. Bausell said in an interview. “They make the results extremely questionable.”

That kind of fog is what Dr. Briggs and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, with a budget of $122 million this year, are trying to eliminate. Their trials tend to be longer and larger. And if a treatment shows promise, the center extends the trials to many centers, further lowering the odds of false positives and investigator bias.

For instance, the center is conducting a large study to see if extracts from the ginkgo biloba tree can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. The clinical trials involve centers in California, Maryland, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and recruited more than 3,000 patients, all of them over 75. The study is to end next year.

Another large study enrolled 570 participants to see if acupuncture provided pain relief and improved function for people with osteoarthritis of the knee. In 2004, it reported positive results. Dr. Brian M. Berman, the study’s director and a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland, said the inquiry “establishes that acupuncture is an effective complement to conventional arthritis treatment.”

In an interview, Dr. Briggs said another good way to improve clinical trials was to ensure product uniformity, especially on herbal treatments. “We feel we have really influenced the standards,” she said.

Over the years, laboratories have found that up to 75 percent of the samples of ginkgo biloba failed to show the claimed levels of the active ingredient. Scientists doing a clinical trial have a large incentive to fix that kind of inconsistency.

Dr. Briggs said such investments would be likely to pay off in the future by documenting real benefits from at least some of the unorthodox treatments. “I believe that as the sensitivities of our measures improve, we’ll do a better job at detecting these modest but important effects” for disease prevention and healing, she said.

An open question is how far the new wave will go. The high costs of good clinical trials, which can run to millions of dollars, means relatively few are done in the field of alternative therapies and relatively few of the extravagant claims are closely examined.

“In tight funding times, that’s going to get worse,” said Dr. Khalsa of Harvard, who is doing a clinical trial on whether yoga can fight insomnia. “It’s a big problem. These grants are still very hard to get and the emphasis is still on conventional medicine, on the magic pill or procedure that’s going to take away all these diseases.”

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Last Updated (Thursday, 22 October 2009 12:12) Written by Administrator Thursday, 22 October 2009 12:07

Who Else Wants to relax and see the world from a different perspective?

Last Updated (Monday, 29 November 1999 17:00) Written by Administrator Wednesday, 21 October 2009 19:59

You may keep stressing about stuff all the time, can’t stop it even if you try. Your time is wasted just thinking about stuff but nothing comes out of it, what can you do it’s a downward painful spiral, well lets reverse it, its time to relax.

1 Decide to actively for one day to do the reverse of what you normally do.
Make a note, do you sit down and procrastinate, are you shy, do you get stressed easily.
Today you are taking a day of from your personality and doing the complete opposite.
Only for a day, you won’t die, if you are worried about embarrassing yourself, then that needs do be reversed. Try it you will have a feeling of relaxation

2 People are stressing you out, someone makes a joke about you and it’s on your mind all day.
Well when someone says something picture them as 5 or a 100 years old, be specific look at there height difference the way they speak, the way they walk. You choose to see it that badly that’s why it’s that bad if your perspective changes it will be different, I guarantee with practice you will come out with witty lines that you didn’t even know were in your head.

3 Feeling uptight, too much to do, no time for your loved ones, no time to relax.
Today’s day and age is the most stressful ever in history, actively seeking relaxation is stressful itself everyone is a juggler and there is a lot to juggle, the shoulders are tired of bearing the weight.
This a grim way of looking at it but it puts things in perspective, imagine being on your death bed, are you going to think why was I running around stressed, if only I made different choices, it wasn’t that bad I should have been relaxed.. With deep self contemplation you have a feeling of relief and relaxation which will make you a far happier and less stressed person.

by Relaxation News Blogpsot

Relaxation: Surprising Benefit Detected

Last Updated (Friday, 02 October 2009 02:11) Written by Administrator Friday, 02 October 2009 02:06

THE simple act of becoming relaxed can have surprising health benefits, new research is showing. In addition to the obvious psychological effects of relieving stress and mental tension, the new findings indicate, deep relaxation, if practiced regularly, can strengthen the immune system and produce a host of other medically valuable physiological changes.

In asthmatics, for example, relaxation training has been found to widen restricted respiratory passages. In some diabetics, relaxation can reduce the need for insulin. In many patients with chronic, unbearable pain, the training has brought about significant relief.

Moreover, the research shows, relaxation may help ward off disease by making people less susceptible to viruses, and by lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Intensive Techniques Are Used

Although such benefits have long been associated with meditation, a particular form of relaxation, the experimental evidence available now is much stronger than it was for meditation a few years ago. In addition, any form of deep relaxation seems to bring these benefits.

The medical advantages are not from ordinary relaxing activities, such as catnaps or gardening, but from intensive techniques that allow people to evoke a specific physiological state. ''Just sitting quietly or, say, watching television, is not enough to produce the physiological changes,'' said Herbert Benson, director of the Division of Behavioral Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital, a part of Harvard Medical School in Boston. ''You need to use a relaxation technique that will break the train of everyday thought, and decrease the activity of the sympathetic nervous system.'' Ancient and Modern Methods

Like meditation and yoga, some of the relaxation techniques being used are quite ancient. Others, like biofeedback or progressive muscle relaxation, are relatively new. And some, like repetitive prayer, may seem worlds away from medicine. All of the techniques, though, seem to evoke a single physiological state that Dr. Benson some years ago called the ''relaxation response.''

The findings have led many hospi-tals to teach their patients ways to relax as part of their medical treatment. In some hospitals physicians can now prescribe a relaxation program that is broadcast on televisions in hospital rooms, so that patients can learn the techniques from their hospital beds.

''More and more doctors are seeing the value of these techniques as a way to tap the inner capacity of patients to help with their own healing,'' said Jon Kabat-Zinn, director of the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. A 57-minute relaxation videotape made by Dr. Kabat-Zinn is in use at about a hundred hospitals. On that videotape, for example, patients are taught to meditate on their breathing, and are led in scanning the sensations throughout their bodies. Fight-or-Flight Syndrome

The sympathetic nervous system reacts to stress by secreting hormones that mobilize the body's muscles and organs to face a threat. Sometimes called the ''fight-or-flight response,'' this mobilization includes a variety of biological responses, including shifting blood flow from the limbs to the organs and increased blood pressure. The stress response does not require an emergency; it can be triggered merely by everyday worries and pressures.

In contrast, the relaxation response releases muscle tension, lowers blood pressure and slows the heart and breath rates.

The new work is showing that along with these changes come shifts in hormone levels that seem to produce beneficial effects on the immune system. For example, relaxation training in medical students during exams was found to increase their levels of helper cells that defend against infectious disease, according to a report in the current issue of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine.

The degree of benefits depends on the rigor with which people use the relaxation techniques. Those medical students who used the techniques just a few times showed little or no changes in the immune measure. Those who did the exercises most faithfully had the strongest immune effects, according to the report by Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and Ronald Glaser of the Ohio State University College of Medicine at Columbus.

continue reading on this New York Times page