Article From Alive Magazine, July 2009 Issue

By Melissa Carr, DrTCM

Facial or cosmetic acupuncture has been performed in China since the Sung Dynasty more that 1000 years ago when it was performed on the Emperor’s concubines, and has become a mainstream alternative to surgery and Botox.

In cosmetic acupuncture, very fine needles are inserted superficially into acupuncture points on the face to improve skin texture, smoothness, clarity, and tone.

The theory

To understand how cosmetic acupuncture works, it helps to understand how aging causes our skin to wrinkle and sag.

Over time recurring facial expressions, combined with a thinning of the skin and declining collagen production, cause muscles to leave their marks on our faces as wrinkles—the furrows between our eyebrows and those crow’s feet at the outer corners of our eyes. Meanwhile other underused muscles begin to lose tone and sag, such as the areas around our jaw, chin, and neck.

The benefits

Facial acupuncture can increase local collagen production which fills in fine lines. The inserted needles also increase blood circulation, allowing for better delivery of nutrients to the face and elimination of waste and toxins away from the face. While the bony structure of the face is not changed, relaxing tight muscles and improving the tone of weak muscles causes the soft structure and shape of the face to be altered.

Some of the benefits of facial rejuvenation include an improvement in the firmness and moisture of skin; a tightening of the pores; a reduction in dark circles or puffiness under the eyes; a lifting of sagging skin, double chins, and drooping eyelids; and a healthy, glowing complexion.

The treatments

Generally, 10 to 12 sessions are recommended for one course of treatment, with each session lasting 60 to 90 minutes. Treatments are performed one to three times weekly with a day of rest in between multiple sessions. Some people notice a difference after just the first treatment, but most should notice results by the sixth or seventh treatment. Maintenance sessions are recommended, but the need varies from person to person.

Because the needles are so fine, acupuncture is not painful. It tends to feel like a tingling warmth or distension.

Facial rejuvenation treatments are generally a bit pricier than conventional acupuncture sessions as the acupuncturist must have extra training and the procedure takes longer. Sessions generally cost between $100 and $150 per treatment with many practitioners offering discount packages.

The side effects

Slight bruising can occur from the needles, but unlike surgery or other more invasive forms of treatment, facial rejuvenation acupuncture does not have a long recovery time.

Facial acupuncture can also be used to improve dermatological issues such as rosacea, acne, eczema, and other skin problems. Many practitioners also stimulate points on the body relating to the individual’s constitution, resulting in some beneficial side effects that include increased energy, improved digestion, better sleep, and enhanced stress management.

Microcurrent stimulation

Are you afraid of needles? Not to worry. Another option is microcurrent stimulation. This device has two wands that are applied to various places on the face. The tiny current that communicates between the wands feels like a mild tingling or nothing at all, but it has a powerful impact.

Microcurrent stimulation uses a specific electrical current that reproduces our body’s own natural current to re-educate the muscles, relax tight ones, and strengthen weak ones. The result is a more youthful appearance.

Qualifications

Because cosmetic acupuncture requires specific education, ask the practitioner you choose about his or her training. Alberta, BC, and Ontario license acupuncturists through regulatory boards which you can call to find a qualified and registered acupuncturist. Unfortunately, the other provinces do not have regulatory boards. Talk to other patients about their experience and whether they would recommend a practitioner.

Though I have been asked many times by patients whether I would do cosmetic acupuncture, my answer for a long time was no. I felt, and still do, that what’s inside is much more important than outward appearance.

However, I have come to understand that what shows on the outside can also reflect one’s inward state. When we feel good about the way we look, our health improves, just as feeling bad about our appearance can negatively impact our health. In addition, for some, taking that first step toward better health as a whole may actually begin with the motivation to look better.

Facial map

Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors use face reading to help in diagnosis because different areas of the face represent different internal organs and systems.

While facial maps differ, in general this is how the facial zones relate to the various organs:

• Area under eyes—kidneys
• Between eyebrows—liver, stomach
• Forehead—intestines, bladder, gallbladder
• Nose—lungs, heart
• Area between nose and lips— spleen, reproductive organs
• Cheeks—lungs, intestines
• Chin—reproductive organs, kidneys, bladder
• Jaw—stomach
• Lips—stomach, intestines
• Ears—kidneys

Melissa Carr, DrTCM, wants to grow old gracefully but look as young and healthy as she now feels. activetcm.com

Source: alive #321, July 2009

Article from Natural News / www.naturalnews.com

(NaturalNews) A new study carried out at Wake Forest University and published in the medical journal Neurology has found that HRT drugs literally shrink women’s brains. Subjects who took HRT drugs for an extended period of time showed a loss of 2.37 cubic centimeters in the frontal lobe of the brain.

The frontal lobe is responsible for memory and thinking skills. These study findings may explain why women who use HRT drugs are increasingly being diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. David Sturdee, president of the International Menopause Society, disagrees that brain shrinkage is a bad thing. “The benefits (of HRT) are still way in excess of the risks,” he explains in a BBC report. HRT drugs also increase the risk of strokes and cancer, but they earn billions of dollars in revenue for drug companies.

Are HRT drugs part of a campaign to keep the women in society barefoot, pregnant and stupid? It just so happens that these drugs — which are mostly pushed by men — keep women in a state of cognitive impairment in which their thinking skills are suppressed. (It turns smart women into stupid women.) The shrinkage of their frontal lobe also causes them to be unable to make good decisions about getting OFF the medications, and that plays right into the hands of Big Pharma’s profit schemes.

It’s not unusual for drugs to shrink the brains of those who take them. ADHD drugs have also been proven to cause stunted growth and brain shrinkage in children and teens. But that doesn’t stop them from being prescribed to children.

The dumbing down of America, it seems, is being accomplished in part through the mass medication of women and children with brain-shrinking drugs.

Last night I was watching footage of a Donahue show from the 1970’s. It was downright fascinating to see how highly intelligent the people in the audience were. They asked intelligent questions and were thoughtful and critical. I sat there shocked at the contrast modern-day television show audiences.

Most of today’s talk shows are idiot fests, where the IQs of audience members are barely above room temperature. It’s amazing how America has gone from a nation of intelligent consumers to idiot consumers in just three decades. That rising wave of idiocy just happens to coincide with the rise of Big Pharma.

Coincidence? Not likely. The mass medication of America has accomplished something quite remarkable: The mass chemical lobotomization of the population by drug companies and their government enforcers (FDA, FTC). With all the brain-shrinking drugs now being consumed by the majority of people in America, it’s no exaggeration to say that America has become a nation of mentally retarded consumers, and I mean that in a clinical sense, not as a casual insult. Widespread brain shrinkage is a (sad) fact in America today.

If it all seems a little confusing, just remember this quote from one of the greatest poets in American history, W. H. Auden, who said: “We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.”

This article from Natural News / www.naturalnews.com

(NaturalNews) The word is out about the dangers of High Fructose Corn Syrup. This sticky sweet substance shows up in nearly all processed foods and headlines in soft drinks. Studies have linked HFCS to obesity. Caution should be practiced though as sugar in general has gotten a bad rep in the past years. Diets like Atkins and South Beach shun all sugar, natural or not, and have led everyone to question what sugars they eat and where they come from. In a world of myriad choices on how to sweeten your foods, what are the benefits or options of good sweet things out there?

Whole food that happens to be sweet is the best bet, namely fruits and vegetables. These contain fructose. By itself, fructose is not a good option, though studies once thought that it was helpful for diabetics, it actually leads to an increased risk of weight gain. Whole fruits have fiber, vitamins and minerals which balance out the naturally occurring sugars with their beneficial qualities. This is why it is essential to eat the whole fruit to keep blood sugars even.

Fruit has been said to be nature’s candy, though that does not always satisfy our sweet tooth. Reaching for artificial sweeteners might be your calorie free answer, but aspartame and saccharin are dangerous chemicals that the FDA link to 75% of adverse food additive reactions.

Real sugar can have its place in a balanced diet; though, take the time to find whole natural sources of sugar. Cleaner options include honey, sourced locally and organic if possible. Raw honey in particular has made its way onto the health market, since none of the nutrients which make honey a healing food have been destroyed.

Maple syrup can be experimented with to sweeten desserts. Agave, a honey like sweet syrup, is currently a hot trend since it doesn’t cause high spikes in blood sugar. Sucanat, Raw Sugar and Turbinado are less refined versions of real sugar that can be used in coffee, tea, baking and cooking; but what are these? Found in health food stores, Sucanat is a form of the sugar plant where the sugar and the existing molasses are kept together and never separated (brown sugar is when the molasses is taken out and added back in, creating a highly processed sugar.) Turbinado is made from the first pressing of the sugar cane plant, resulting in larger crystals and a truer molasses type flavor. Date sugar is made from dates and not refined like cane sugar.

Though calories for these sugars are similar to refined white sugar, they are less processed, offer some minor benefits and act more with your body more than against it. To stay sweet the right way, just make sure the amount of sugar in your diet does not account for more than 10% of your daily calories.

Here is a quick guideline for working with these natural sugars in your own recipes (all equivalent to 1 cup white sugar):
Sucanat 1 cup
Turbinado 1 cup
Date Sugar 1 cup
Honey 1/2 cup - reduce other liquids in recipe by 1/2 cup
Agave 3 dessert Spoons

healthmad.com/…/dangers-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup
www.healthrecipes.com/natural_sweet…
www.westonaprice.org/transition/sug…

This article from Natural News / www.naturalnews.com

(NaturalNews) What if medical science discovered a drug that reduced the risk of breast cancer almost 60 percent in women who are at high risk because of a family history of the disease? No doubt it would soon be making Big Pharma billions of dollars and would be hailed as a “miracle drug” by doctors and women alike, even if it came loaded with side effects, as most medications do. Now consider this: a new study just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine has documented something that makes women with a family history of breast cancer 59 percent less likely to develop a breast malignancy themselves. The “new” and groundbreaking discovery is actually as old as humankind and totally natural — it’s breastfeeding.

“This is good news for women with a family history of breast cancer,” Dr. Alison Stuebe, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine and lead author of the study, said in a media statement. “Our results suggest a woman can lower her risk of cancer simply by breastfeeding her children.”

The authors didn’t find this dramatic difference in risk among women who didn’t have a family history of breast cancer. “This could be because there’s something about genetically caused breast cancer that’s affected by breastfeeding, or it could be because rates of breast cancer were so low in women without a family history that we couldn’t see an association in this data set,” Dr. Stuebe explained.

Among women with a strong family history of breast cancer whose mothers and/or sisters had developed the disease, the scientists found that those who breastfed their babies were less than half as likely to develop premenopausal breast cancer as those who had not nursed their offspring. For women with a family history, the enormously lowered risk with breastfeeding was similar to taking an anti-estrogen drug such as Tamoxifen for five years. Tamoxifen is a selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERM) that blocks the effects of estrogen in the breast tissue cells and can cause a host of side effects including dizziness, mood swings, leg swelling, difficulty seeing and heart attack-causing blood clots.

Just how long a woman nurses appears to be less critical than the fact she breastfeeds at all. The reduction in breast cancer risk was similar whether women breastfed for a total of three months or for more than three years. There was also no significant difference in risk for the women who exclusively breastfed compared to moms who breastfed but also supplemented with other foods.

So why does breastfeeding reduce the risk of breast cancer in high risk women? The authors of the study stated the explanation is still unknown, but they suspect that when women do not breastfeed, inflammation and engorgement shortly after birth produce changes in breast tissue that may up the odds of breast cancer.

As NaturalNews has reported previously, in addition to having health benefits for moms (http://www.naturalnews.com/026112_b…), breastfeeding slashes the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) in half (http://www.naturalnews.com/026239.html) and boosts academic achievement in children (http://www.naturalnews.com/026530_b…).”Breastfeeding is good for mothers and for babies,” Dr. Stuebe said.

Unfortunately, according to a recent CDC study, more than half of women said they stopped breastfeeding earlier than they wanted to. “Mothers and babies need supportive hospital policies, paid maternity leave, and workplace accommodations so that they can meet their breastfeeding goals,” Dr. Stuebe stated in the media release. “Public health begins with breastfeeding.”

For more information:
http://www.med.unc.edu/www/news/bre…
http://www.breastcancer.org/treatme…

This article from Natural News / www.naturalnews.com

(NaturalNews) Ovaries, the almond-shaped organs that sit on each side of the uterus in a woman’s pelvis, contain eggs and produce hormones that control the menstrual cycle. Mounting research shows they must do more than that, too, because after the surgical removal of ovaries, women are at heightened risk for serious diseases. But cutting out a woman’s most important so-called female organs must only be done for life-saving, urgent medical emergencies, right? Wrong. A study in the Menopause earlier this year noted that the ovaries of 300,000 American women are removed each year for no compelling reason at all — for example, for benign cysts that would most likely go away if left alone. Now researchers have found that removal of the ovaries, a procedure called a bilateral oophorectomy has long term consequences never considered before. It ups the risk of lung cancer.

The startling link was made by epidemiologists from the Universite de Montreal, the Research Centre of the Centre Hospitalier de l’Universite de Montreal and the Institut Armand-Frappier (INRS) in Canada. “We found that women who experienced non-natural menopause are at almost twice the risk of developing lung cancer compared to women who experienced natural menopause,” research team member Dr. Anita Koushik said in a statement to the media. “This increased risk of lung cancer was particularly observed among women who had non-natural menopause by having had both their ovaries surgically removed.”

The scientists investigated 422 women with lung cancer and 577 control subjects at 18 hospitals across Montreal, Quebec, Canada. They looked at socio-demographic characteristics, where the women had lived, their occupational exposures, medical histories, whether they smoked or not and their menstruation and pregnancy histories.

“A major strength of this study was the detailed smoking information which we obtained from all study participants; this is important because of the role of smoking in lung cancer and because smokers generally have lower estrogen levels than non-smokers,” said Dr. Koushik. “Although smoking is the dominant cause of lung cancer, we know other factors can play an important role in enhancing the impact of tobacco carcinogens; this research suggests that in women hormonal factors may play such a role.”

Among the research subjects who went through natural menopause, the median age for experiencing the “change of life” was 50 years old. But women were only about 43 when they went through menopause brought on from non-natural means by having their ovaries removed. And these younger woman were shown to be far more likely to develop lung cancer. The specific reason why oophorectomy could trigger lung tumors remains unclear. Could it be sudden lack of natural hormones in the body or the fact so many women are pushed to go on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) after removal of their ovaries?

“It’s possible that vulnerability to lung cancer is caused by early and sudden decrease in estrogen levels or potentially long-term use of hormone replacement therapy and further research is needed to explore these hypotheses,” scientist Dr. Jack Siemiatycki said in the press statement.

The Canadian study follows the earlier research published in Menopause which had equally bad news about the consequences of ovary removal. That research showed the risk of dying from cardiovascular events soared for women who had undergone an oophorectomy.

For more information:
http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/u…
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/…
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/0…