A recent UK study conducted by the University of York, Department of Health Studies revealed promising outcomes in the use of acupuncture for the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome (irritable bowel syndrome) in Saratoga Springs.
Although the report of the study has the typical pandering that consigns alternative modes of treatment as complementing conventional medicine, the study revealed some interesting results.
The study involved a total of 233 patients whose symptom severity scores (SSS) were 100 or above and who had been suffering IBS for an average of 13 years. They were equally divided into a couple of treatment protocols. One group was treated with conventional treatment while the other half was given once a week acupuncture treatment for 10 weeks plus conventional treatment also for 10 weeks.
The group treated with acupuncture plus standard care manifested greater decreases in their SSS scores; moreover, these improvements endured for three, six, and nine months up to a whole year after the trial when the patient reported for follow-up testing.
Since it was obvious that conventional treatments did not work for these patients who had used them for more than a decade, how come it took this long for this report to consider acupuncture in a nation that provides free healthcare to all its citizens?
Because mainstream medicine has little to offer IBS patients, in order to manage their IBS these people have to normally resort to watching what they eat to avoid triggering symptoms.
Managing stress and watching one’s diet to prevent the rise of IBS is also recommended by Chinese medicine practitioners. For the treatment of IBS, acupuncturists focus on harmonizing spleen and liver chi by using Chinese herbs and acupuncture.
What is Acupuncture?
For most people living in Western societies, it may be difficult for them to understand TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). It may be even more difficult for Western trained physicians to grasp the fundamentals of this five millennia old medical tradition. TCM has underlying principles and paradigms that are entirely different from Western medical concepts.
The diagnoses of TCM are made based on chi or organ energy functions and not physical or biochemical. These diagnoses determine what kind of herbs is prescribed and what acupoints are to be needled. Acupuncture is used to stimulate those chi energies to remove any blockage to its flow along well-charted energy channels known as meridians.
Rather than using lots of invasive biopsies, X-rays, and blood tests, practitioners of TCM are able to identify excess, obstructed or deficient chi and how it is associated with a patient’s health by knowing the quality of the patient’s pulse with their fingers.
Moreover, these practitioners will closely observe the patient’s tongue and detect any signs that are often ignored while observing the patient’s symptoms.
This unique way of diagnosing a condition and reading your symptoms can be amazing. These practitioners can even determine your health trend and consequences even before the technology used by western medicine can. This means that before it becomes a full blown physical reality, a health problem can be identified by diagnosing at the subtle chi energy.
When a diagnosis has been made, the practitioner can recommend a prescription of herbs and an intervention of acupuncture treatments. For people who are impatient and want to see results ASAP, TCM may not be for them. What they will miss, however, are results of real improved health and oftentimes, even a cure.
Sadly and for financial reasons, Big Pharma, the FDA, and AMA, collectively known as the Medical Mafia are good at maintaining their toxic hold on the type of healthcare you get, a type of healthcare that is not meant to cure a condition but to merely address the symptoms and one that even creates more medical issues than it cures. Even though they are less expensive, these “alternative” treatments are denied coverage by the insurance industry.
The type of healthcare leaves patients feeling some sort of symptomatic relief and oftentimes believe they are cured when they’re not. They are on this cycle of sick care where palliative treatment is given that may relieve symptoms but at the same times create additional sicknesses from the side effects of radiations from X-rays and CT scans, antibiotics, toxic pharmaceuticals, and reactions from toxic injections utilized for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
COMMENTS