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Staying Healthy In Autumn
Seasons change, and your body and mental outlook change with them in predictable ways. Oriental medicine combines knowledge of seasonal characteristics with your unique health situation to balance your energy (chi) to help you adapt and thrive during the cool, crisp months of autumn.
In this episode of Seasonal Health Tips, Kitty talks about how the Metal element of Autumn affects your health, and how to stay healthy during this season of cooler days and longer nights. (To get the most out of what Kitty has to say, open the 5 Element Theory chart in a new window while listening.)
(Length 07:39, Size 8.8 MB)
The Metal Element
Every season is associated with one of the Five Elements, and for autumn, the element is Metal—the energetic force that governs the health and functionality of your Lungs and Large Intestine.
According to Taoist 5 Element Theory, the Lungs are the primary influence affecting the immune system. So during autumn, it’s important to eat food that builds the overall health of the Lungs to strengthen your immune system now, and in preparation for winter.
Autumn Health Problems
Because the Lungs are most sensitive during autumn, this is a time to focus on preventing or responding to colds, coughs, sore throat, and the like. And for people already predisposed to lung problems, such as bronchitis, pneumonia, and emphysema, autumn is the time to take precautions to minimize your vulnerability as we advance towards winter.
Avoid Drafts and Breezes. Temperatures are dropping, evenings are getting cooler, and in some places breezes are picking up as seasonal winds begin to blow. During this time, you need to be mindful of breezes that make you feel chilly. To avoid getting sick, keep your neck, wrists, and ankles from being exposed to wind and drafts. This is a likely way for an illness to start.
Be Aware of Dryness. During autumn, slowly increasing wind and cold begins to create dryness in the air, which affects your skin and Lungs. The effects of the natural tendency toward dryness in autumn are magnified as you begin to turn on the heat—at home, at work, and in the car—to take the chill out of the air.
Your skin and Lungs don’t like dryness, so it’s important to drink enough fluids to make sure they don’t get dried out.
Eat Less Spicy Food. Because the Lungs are especially sensitive during the autumn months, it’s a good idea to minimize the amount of spicy food you eat, to avoid irritating them. As a result, your Lungs will be less vulnerable to pathogens.
Autumn Health Tips
It’s important to pay attention to how you feel. As soon as you feel a “cold” coming on, it’s time to take preventive action by enjoying one of these nourishing, natural home brews.
Scallion Broth
This simple broth will help you sweat lightly, and is an excellent remedy for preventing and getting rid of colds:
- Take one scallion, and chop it up.
- Boil in water for 5 to 10 minutes. (Keep the lid on the pot to prevent vapor from escaping.)
- Flavor with tamari.
- Sip it slowly, bundle up, then lie down, or go to sleep.
Ginger Tea
If scallion broth doesn’t suit your culinary fancy, try ginger tea:
- Put a couple of slices of fresh ginger in one and one-half cups of water.
- Boil for 5 to 10 minutes. (Time it based on how strong you like your ginger tea.)
- Keep the lid on the pot to prevent vapor from escaping.
- Add a little honey and lemon.
- Sip it slowly, bundle up, then lie down, or go to sleep.
Scallion broth is the more effective of the two remedies, but if for some reason it doesn’t appeal to you, ginger tea is a good alternative
Balance is Key
Strive to balance your diet so that it includes some vegetables, some fruit, some grain, and a handful of moderately spicy foods.
Get Help If You Need It
If you experience any lung-related, or other symptoms that don’t clear up quickly, call BIOM for an appointment to get a prescribed formula of medical herbs to help alleviate your symptoms and address the problem—before it becomes more advanced.
Seasonal Health Tips • Fall Health Tips • Podcasts • Tell-a-Friend • Permalink
Fire Is Waning
It’s late summer, with hints of Autumn in the air. In 5 Element terms: Fire is waning, Earth is ascending for a brief period, before we head into Metal season of Autumn. This means we still need to be conscientious about heat-related vulnerabilities in the Heart and Kidneys, and start rebuilding them—especially the Kidneys since their main season is coming up in Winter.
Hopefully you’ve spent the summer strengthening your Lungs so that they’re ready to channel the energy Autumn brings to them. If you have Lung-related weakness, it’s a good idea to use acupuncture & acupressure, specific Chinese medical herbs, and Lung-focused Chi Kung to avoid Lung-related illnesses this Autumn.
Also, every time we move to a new season, there is a short period where the digestive system will be energized, which, at this time of year, may make you vulnerable to heat-related problems that specifically affect the digestive system:
A few examples include:
What You Can Do
Just start noticing what’s happening with you. Obviously, take note of any acute, or chronic symptoms you’re experiencing, and also look for relationships and patterns related to the things you do—like diet, exercise, work—and how you feel as a result.
Pay attention to your health. For example, during late-August through September, some questions to ask yourself are:
These types of problems are more likely to happen now, in late-Summer, early-Fall—especially if you have weak digestive organs.
Watch what you eat. What you eat plays a major role in how you feel. Some dietary considerations to be aware of include:
If you need help with any of the symptoms listed above, or want to know more: email Kitty.
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Mid-Summer Checkup: Heat-Related Health Problems
It’s the middle of summer, a time Oriental medicine describes as the ‘Fire’ season. The heart is your body’s primary focus during summer; it’s the internal organ where the heat of ‘Fire’ concentrates. In addition to heat-related problems that can directly affect the heart during summer, you have other internal organs that are also heat sensitive, like the liver, which has a tendency to become overheated during this time of year, making you more vulnerable to feeling irritated.
In this episode of ‘Seasonal Health Tips’, Kitty talks about how your heart (Fire), liver (Wood), and kidneys (Water) interact to affect your health in the middle of summer. (To get the most out of what Kitty has to say, open the 5 Element Theory chart in a new window while listening.)
Length 03:44, Size 4.3 MB
Water Cools Fire: Summer’s Impact on Your Kidneys and Bladder
If your liver has a tendency to get unbalanced, it can release quite a bit of heat during the summer, which in turn causes all sorts of heat-related problems, like high blood pressure, rashes and hives. In nature, when fire becomes excessive it also becomes dangerous, and water is needed to control it, it’s the same way with your body in summer. Considering this, as your body draws on its ‘water’ resources to cool itself down, your ‘Water’ element organs, which are the kidneys and the urinary bladder, tend to get overworked, and if they are weak or unbalanced to begin with, you can experience discomforts, and potentially a crisis, related to those organs.
The ‘Water’ energy of kidneys cools down other organs that get overheated in summer.
Maintaining Your Engine Avoids Problems
It’s a lot like the radiator in a car, the water in the radiator provides the cooling mechanism for the engine, which keeps the whole thing from overheating. When the water is low, or the radiator runs dry, which is equivalent to the kidneys being weak and unbalanced, the engine is at risk; so too your body is at some risk when your kidneys are taxed by heat during the summer. This is an Oriental medicine example of why many people experience problems like high blood pressure in the summer.
Summer Health Tips
It’s important to drink enough water and eat the right foods to ensure you’re meeting your body’s summertime needs.
- Drink more water. Because it’s hot and you perspire a lot during the summer, the average amount of water you should drink in a 24-hour period is 48 ounces — this includes all fluids, such as, juice, soda, and other beverages. (Note: 48 ounces is the equivalent of 6 eight ounce glasses.) When you are sweating more than usual — as on some days in the summer — drinking more is advisable. It’s important to pay attention to how you feel, and drink more when you’re thirsty.
- Monitor your intake of salt. An imbalance of salt in your body — too much, or too little — can readily occur when temperatures are hot. You will know you’re getting too much salt if you find that rings you wear get tighter, and socks or shoes that fit you comfortably during cooler weather, leave lines or wrinkles on your feet or ankles because of too much fluid in those areas.
- Eat cooling foods. Cucumbers, mung beans, and watermelon are particularly good foods to eat in the summer. They help to keep your body cool, and because of their diuretic properties, they also help to offset excess salt intake.
Seasonal Health Tips • Summer Health Tips • Podcasts • Tell-a-Friend • Permalink
Reclaiming The Yin
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.Staying Healthy in Summer
Seasons change, and your body and mental outlook change with them. And because human beings are a part of nature, our bodies react to the season in predictable ways. Oriental medicine combines knowledge of seasonal characteristics with your unique health situation to balance your energy (chi) to help you adapt and thrive during this season of luxurious growth. Here are some things to consider for staying healthy as you enjoy summertime.
In this episode of ‘Seasonal Health Tips’ Kitty talks about the Fire element of summer, and what to do to stay healthy during this season of ‘luxurious growth.’ (To get the most out of what Kitty has to say, refer to the Five Element Theory Chart while listening.)
Length 04:15, Size 4.9 MB
The Fire Element
Every season is associated with one of the Five Elements, and for summer, the element is ‘Fire.’ Summer weather is typically hot, and relatively damp. For example, the muggy feeling you experience during summer comes from heat causing dampness to condense and rise as it gets hotter. As on the outside, so on your inside: in summertime, there is a tendency for dampness to accumulate within your body.
Summer Health Problems
During summer, some typical heat-related problems are: rashes, headaches and feelings of irritation. For example: Blood pressure may rise from too much heat trapped in the body; damp-induced blister rashes, or boils can erupt on the skin; and if you have eczema, you may experience more occurrences of it in the summer.
Summer Health Tips
It’s important to drink enough water and eat the right foods to ensure you’re meeting your body’s summertime needs.
- Drink more water. Because it’s hot and you perspire a lot during the summer, the average amount of water you should drink in a 24-hour period is 48 ounces — this includes all fluids, such as, juice, soda, and other beverages. (Note: 48 ounces is the equivalent of 6 eight ounce glasses.) When you are sweating more than usual — as on some days in the summer — drinking more is advisable. It’s important to pay attention to how you feel, and drink more when you’re thirsty.
- Monitor your intake of salt. An imbalance of salt in your body — too much, or too little — can readily occur when temperatures are hot. You will know you’re getting too much salt if you find that rings you wear get tighter, and socks or shoes that fit you comfortably during cooler weather, leave lines or wrinkles on your feet or ankles because of too much fluid in those areas.
- Eat cooling foods. Cucumbers, mung beans, and watermelon are particularly good foods to eat in the summer. They help to keep your body cool, and because of their diuretic properties, they also help to offset excess salt intake.
Stay Healthy
So enjoy your summer and help ensure your health by being conscious of a few simple things you can do for yourself and your family:
- Drink enough water.
- Monitor your salt intake.
- Eat cooling foods.
If you experience any heat-related symptoms that don’t clear up quickly, call a qualified Oriental medicine practitioner for an appointment to get a prescribed formula of medical herbs to help alleviate your symptoms and address the problem — before it becomes more advanced.
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Concierge Service at BIOM
-- Commit on a 6 month basis and you get such and such ...
-- Talk about how good we are and what they get here as compared to other places.
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Kitty’s Approach to Treatment
QUESTIONS I ASK:
First, what condition is it that you’d like to address?
How did you decide that acupuncture is the way you’d like to treat it?
How recent is the onset of this condition?
Are there any other health issues which you’d like to include in treatment?
SOME INFORMATION ABOUT HOW I WORK
I have a big picture/ whole individual approach to treatment, and within that context I address specific issues.
I spend about one hour in the intake appointment gathering information – current, personal medical history, family history, etc.
There is another hour in the intake session for exam, diagnosis and discussion and then, treatment.
I have a small practice where I stay in touch with clients I’m currently treating.
The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?, Inventor Tells 60 Minutes He Hopes To Live Long Enough To See M
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/10/60minutes/main4006951.shtml
Work on this with kitty and her ideas about the energy waves of Chi Kung combined with gold beads/fillings/caps and how that corresponds to this article.
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The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?
April 13, 2008(CBS) What if we told you that a guy with no background in science or medicine-not even a college degree-has come up with what may be one of the most promising breakthroughs in cancer research in years?
Well it’s true, and if you think it sounds improbable, consider this: he did it with his wife’s pie pans and hot dogs.
His name is John Kanzius, and he’s a former businessman and radio technician who built a radio wave machine that has cancer researchers so enthusiastic about its potential they’re pouring money and effort into testing it out.
Here’s the important part: if clinical trials pan out-and there’s still a long way to go-the Kanzius machine will zap cancer cells all through your body without the need for drugs or surgery and without side effects. None at all. At least that’s the idea.
The last thing John Kanzius thought he’d ever do was try to cure cancer. A former radio and television executive from Pennsylvania, he came to Florida to enjoy his retirement.
“I have no business being in the cancer business. It’s not something that a layman like me should be in, it should be left to doctors and research people,” he told correspondent Lesley Stahl.
“But sometimes it takes an outsider,” Stahl remarked.
“Sometimes it just – maybe you get lucky,” Kanzius replied.
It was the worst kind of luck that gave Kanzius the idea to use radio waves to kill cancer cells: six years ago, he was diagnosed with terminal leukemia and since then has undergone 36 rounds of toxic chemotherapy. But it wasn’t his own condition that motivated him, it was looking into the hollow eyes of sick children on the cancer ward at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
“I saw the smiles of youth and saw their spirits were broken. And you could see that they were sort of asking, ‘Why can’t they do something for me?’” Kanzius told Stahl.
“So they started to haunt you. The children,” Stahl asked.
“Their faces. I still remember them holding on their Teddy bears and so forth,” he replied. “And shortly after that I started my own chemotherapy, my third round of chemotherapy.”
Kanzius told Stahl the chemotherapy made him very sick and that he couldn’t sleep at night. “And I said, ‘There’s gotta be a better way to treat cancer.’”
It was during one of those sleepless nights that the light bulb went off. When he was young, Kanzius was one of those kids who built radios from scratch, so he knew the hidden power of radio waves. Sick from chemo, he got out of bed, went to the kitchen, and started to build a radio wave machine.
“Started looking in the cupboard and I saw pie pans and I said, ‘These are perfect. I can modify these,’” he recalled.
His wife Marianne woke up that night to a lot of banging and clamoring. “I was concerned truthfully that he had lost it,” she told Stahl.
“She felt sorry for me,” Kanzius added.
“I did,” Marianne Kanzius acknowledged. “And I had mentioned to him, ‘Honey, the doctors can’t-you know, find an answer to cancer. How can you think that you can?’”
That’s what 60 Minutes wanted to know, so Stahl went to his garage laboratory to find out.
Here’s how it works: one box sends radio waves over to the other, creating enough energy to activate gas in a fluorescent light. Kanzius put his hand in the field to demonstrate that radio waves are harmless to humans.
“So right from the beginning you’re trying to show that radio waves could activate gas and not harm the human-anything else,” Stahl remarked. “‘Cause you’re looking for some kind of a treatment with no side effects, that’s what’s in your head.”
“No side effects,” Kanzius replied.
But how could he focus the radio waves to destroy cancer cells?
“That was the next $64,000 question,” Kanzius said.
The answer would cost much more than that. Kanzius spent about $200,000 just to have a more advanced version of his machine built. He knew that metal heats up when it’s exposed to high-powered radio waves. So what if a tumor was injected with some kind of metal, and zapped with a focused beam of radio waves? Would the metal heat up and kill the cancer cells, but leave the area around them unharmed? He did his first test with hot dogs.
“I’m going to inject it with some copper sulfate,” Kanzius explained, demonstrating the machine. “And I’m going to take the probe right at the injection site.”
Kanzius placed the hot dog in his radio wave machine, and Stahl watched to see if the temperature would rise in that one area where the metal solution was and nowhere else.
“And when I saw it start to go up I said, ‘Eureka, I’ve done it,’” Kanzius remembered. “And I said, ‘God, I gotta shut this off and see whether it’s still cold down below.’ So I shut it off, took my probe, went down here where it wasn’t injected. And the temperature dropped back down. And I said, ‘God, maybe I got something here.’”
Kanzius thought he had found a way attack cancer cells without the collateral damage caused by chemotherapy and radiation. Today, his invention is in the laboratories of two major research centers – the University of Pittsburgh and M.D. Anderson, where Dr. Steven Curley, a liver cancer surgeon, is testing it.
“This technology may allow us to treat just about any kind of cancer you can imagine,” Dr. Curley told Stahl. “I’ve gotta tell you, in 20 years of research this is the most exciting thing that I’ve encountered.”
That’s because Kanzius impressed Curley with another remarkable idea: to combine the radio waves from his device with something cutting edge – space age nanoparticles made of metal or carbon. They are so small that thousands of them can fit in a single cancer cell. Because they’re metallic, Kanzius was hoping his radio waves would them heat up and kill the cancer.
“If these nanoparticles work then we truly have something huge here,” Kanzius told Stahl.
Enter Rick Smalley, another cancer patient at M.D. Anderson and the man who won the Nobel Prize for discovering nanoparticles made from carbon. As luck would have it, Dr. Curley was called in one day to examine Smalley. Before leaving, he asked him for some of his nanoparticles.
“I proceeded to tell him what I wanted to do and that I thought they would heat. He looked at me with sort of a studied long look and didn’t say anything. And then he looked at me and said, ‘It won’t work,’” Curley remembered. “And just laughed and said, ‘Well, look, I’ll give you some. But don’t be too disappointed.’”
So Dr. Curley brought a vial of those precious nanoparticles to John Kanzius.
And on an August day in 2005, Curley and Kanzius put them to the test. Would the metallic nanoparticles heat up enough to kill cancer?
“So we take the nanoparticles, we put ‘em in the radio field. And in about 15 seconds, they’re boiling and heating and Steve Curley couldn’t contain himself. He called Rick Smalley and he said, ‘Rick, you’re not going to believe this. He just blew the smithereens out of your nanoparticles,’” Kanzius recalled.
Smalley’s response? “The only thing that I got out of him after this pause was, “Holy s…,’” Curley recalled.
Not long after that day, Smalley died of lymphoma. Once a skeptic, he had become one of Kanzius’ biggest supporters.
“He didn’t expect it, but he embraced it to his death bed when he told Dr. Curley this will change medicine forever. Don’t stop, no matter what you do,” Kanzius told Stahl.
And they haven’t stopped. They’ve already shown that the Kanzius machine can heat nanoparticles and cook cancer to death in animals. Dr. Curley with rabbits, and in Pittsburgh, Dr. David Geller demonstrated to 60 Minutes how he used nanoparticles, made from gold, to kill liver cancer cells grown in rats.
“Now what we’re going to do is inject the nanoparticles,” Dr. Geller explained. “Directly into the tumor.”
In the study the rats, anesthetized to keep them still, were exposed to the Kanzius radio waves. Dr. Geller later examined their tumors under a microscope.
“What you can see is that cells are starting to fall apart. You see white spaces in between them. The body of the cell is shrinking, the cells are starting to die,” Geller pointed out.
“And can you tell from this whether the area surrounding the tumor had any destruction?” Stahl asked.
“Grossly inspecting the animal, we did not see not see any damage to the surrounding tissue,” Geller said.
So far, the Kanzius method has only been applied to solid, localized tumors in animals. The ultimate goal is to treat cancer that has metastasized or spread to other parts of the body. Those undetectable rogue cells are what most often kill people with cancer and the trick is finding them.
“If we can’t target the microscopic cells this is not going to be a cure,” Curley said.
That’s why Curley is trying to use special molecules that are programmed to target cancer cells and attach nanoparticles to them.
He showed Stahl an animation of how he hopes the targeting will work in people one day, with a simple injection of gold nanoparticles into the bloodstream.
“What we’re seeing here is an example of a gold nanoparticle in this case with an antibody on it, so the antibody would be the targeting molecule,” Curley explained. “You can see it is tiny compared to a normal red blood cell just imagine all of these billions of these gold nanoparticles circulating through the body and then once they get into the blood vessels going to the tumor, these nanoparticles would go through and bind on the surface of the cell.”
“The cancer cell. It wouldn’t bind on a normal cell,” Stahl observed.
“That’s right, they would bind only to the cancer cell. Now here’s the nanoparticles in the cell, here comes John’s radio frequency treatment. The cells get hot and they’re destroyed,” Curley said.
“Gosh, it does look like one of those science fiction movies,” Stahl remarked.
“Right now it is a little science fiction,” Curley agreed. “We’re not quite to the real time yet, but it’s got a lot of promise.”
Even if all goes well in the lab, it’ll be at least another four years before human trials can start. But John Kanzius says he’s afraid he doesn’t have that much time. So to help speed up the research, he’s been raising millions of dollars and getting press coverage about his invention.
“Now I can’t count the number of times the journalistic community, has done stories on a cancer cure,” Stahl said. “I did one in 1973. …How many times have we seen these things work in the Petri dish, work with animals. And then you get them into humans and they don’t work.”
“Dozens,” Curley replied.
But if this one does work, it most likely won’t be developed in time to help the man who invented it. John Kanzius may have the option of a bone marrow transplant that could buy him more time, but after six years of chemo it would be another grueling ordeal.
“Did you ever say, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going to put myself through it,’?” Stahl asked.
“Yes. I said that-only about a year and a half ago,” Kanzius replied. “I changed my mind because I think with all the research that’s going on with the institutions, that maybe, I’d like to be around for the first patient to get treated and just have a smile.”
“Oh my God,” Stahl said.
“And then I don’t care anymore,” Kanzius replied.
Produced by Tanya Simon
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Meeting Marks 10th Anniversary of NIH Acupuncture Conference [CAM at the NIH, April 2008] [NCCAM New
http://nccam.nih.gov/news/newsletter/2008_april/acupuncturecon.htm
Meeting Marks 10th Anniversary of NIH Acupuncture Conference
Copyright Bob Stockfield
© Bob Stockfield
Just over 10 years ago, an NIH Consensus Development Conference assessed acupuncture’s effectiveness in treating various diseases and conditions. What has happened in the field of acupuncture research since that conference and its later report (called a consensus statement)? What areas will be important in future research?
These were among the key questions that speakers and audiences addressed at a special annual meeting of the Society for Acupuncture Research. “The Status and Future of Acupuncture Research: 10 Years Post-NIH Consensus Conference” took place November 8–11, 2007, in Baltimore. The society cosponsored the meeting with the University of Maryland Center for Integrative Medicine, and NCCAM provided grant support. The conference drew more than 300 practitioners, scientists, students, and other attendees from eight countries, who discussed acupuncture research in both general and disorder-specific contexts.
Detoxify and Tonify Your Liver
During the Spring season are you, or people you know more irritable than usual? Or surprised by unexpected surges of anger?
If so, then Oriental Medicine can help you become more calm and balanced in your body and mind.
According to the 5 Element Theory, Spring is the season of the ‘Wood” energy, and the energetics of ‘Wood’ directly affect your Liver. Since the Liver affects the nerves, if your Liver isn’t balanced you’ll be more prone to irritability and anger in Spring than during the rest of the year.
Tonify and Detoxify
Because the tendency towards irritability and unexpected anger are directly related to Liver imbalance, if you tonify and balance the Liver, you should feel calmer and less frustrated. (“Anger management” techniques are always useful, but if you detoxify your Liver, you’ll have to rely on them less often.)
When your Liver is out of balance you’re more prone to irritability and anger.
How do you know if your Liver is “toxic” — assume that it is! With the amount of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides all around us — in the air, water, food, and other products we use, you should assume your Liver is somewhat toxic, and start doing some simple things to detoxify it.
Oriental Medicine • Seasonal Health Tips • Spring Health Tips • Tell-a-Friend • Permalink