Skin Problems and Chinese Medicine

Your skin is more than just the outer layer of the body. From a Chinese medical perspective, it provides a critical measure of your body's health, even informing us on what is happening at a deep level, and provides the acupuncturist with much information about how well balanced the client is.

In addition to being a diagnostic tool, acupuncturists treat a wide variety of specific dermatological complaints running the gamut from acne and wrinkles, to severe psoriasis and eczema.

A brief overview of Chinese medicine and the sorts of dermatological problems we treat on a regular basis can be read here.

Here is a reprint of that article here:

Treatment of Skin Conditions with Acupuncture
By: Diane Joswick L.Ac.

Acupuncture and Oriental medicine can be very effective at treating skin conditions. Treatments can provide quick relief for acute symptoms and significant and lasting relief from recurrent or chronic skin conditions.

The skin reflects and reacts to imbalances within the body's internal landscape and the effects of the environment. Internal disharmonies caused by strong emotions, diet, and your constitution, as well as environmental influences such as wind, dryness, dampness, and heat, can all contribute to the development of a skin disorder. To keep your skin healthy and beautiful on the outside, you must work on the inside of your body as well. Increasing the flow of energy, blood and lymph circulation improves the skin's natural healthy color.

Promotion of collagen production increases muscle tone and elasticity, helping to firm the skin. Stimulating the formation of body fluids nourishes the skin and encourages it to be moister, softer, smoother and more lustrous.

General skin conditions that can be treated with acupuncture and Oriental medicine include acne, dermatitis, eczema, pruritus, psoriasis, rosacea, shingles and urticaria (hives). Oriental medicine does not recognize skin problems as one particular syndrome. Instead, it aims to treat the specific symptoms that are unique to each individual using a variety of techniques with acupuncture, such as herbal medicine, bodywork, lifestyle/dietary recommendations and energetic exercises to restore imbalances found in the body. Therefore, if 10 patients are treated with Oriental medicine for eczema, each patient will receive a unique, customized treatment with different lifestyle and dietary recommendations.

Dry Needling, "...a dumbed down version of acupuncture."

Below is an article copied in its entirety from an article describing the battle over the coopting of acupuncture by physical therapists in several states. It's well worth a read and hits the mark over concerns with both the reduction of an ancient, robust and complete healing system like acupuncture to a series of motor points; as well as a worthwhile comparison of a 27-hour training course for physcial therapists vs. a four-year education for acupuncturists.

Why healers are at war over dry needling

You may have walked by a physical therapist’s or chiropractor’s office recently and noticed that they were offering “dry needling,” a treatment that looks an awful lot like acupuncture and is growing in popularity.

And while some acupuncturists don’t see much harm (kind of) in sharing their craft with less trained, Western practitioners—a difference of 27-plus hours and 800 practice runs for dry needling and four years plus robust internships for acupuncturists—others are very concerned about the health and safety of those getting the prickly treatment, as well as what this means for the future of acupuncture.

You could say a war a brewing among healers, and it has its factions.

“It’s just poorly-trained acupuncture,” says David Miller, MD, who’s also a licensed acupuncturist practicing both Eastern and Western medicine, in Chicago. “It’s a wild, wild west of treatment.”

According to physical therapists, though, the training is part of a well-established repertoire. “I’m not a dry needler, I’m a doctor of physical therapy,” says Michigan-based Edo Zylstra. He’s also the founder of KinetaCore, the company that trains somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the physical therapists getting certified in dry needling nationwide.

“Being trained in dry needling is just a tool in my toolbox, along with other effective treatments like manipulation, correctional exercises and modalities like e-stim, hot packs, correctional functional exercise, and lasers. Dry needling allows physical therapists to be the most effective in returning patients to a higher functional and pain-free life ,” Zylstra says.

So what is dry needling, really?

Dry needling is a myofascial trigger point practice that was born in the 1940s when doctors discovered that applying hypodermic needles into a source of a patient’s muscular pain could provide relief. “Physicians noticed that muscles would fasciculate, then relax,” explains Jill Blakeway, a licensed acupuncturist and the founder of Manhattan’s YinOva Center.

Currently, dry needling and acupuncture look fairly similar in practice, but not in the theory behind them. Acupuncturists insert needles into “meridiens that are believed to be the body’s energy pathways,” according to Blakeway. Dry needling inserts very similar needles directly into muscles, or trigger points, until they twitch, signaling that the relief process is beginning.

Why are people into it?

The practice has gained more popularity due to adoption from everyone from runners with injuries to the NFL for its pain relief, hastened recovery, improvements in functional movement, and the uptick of courses that train PTs to be licensed in dry needling. It’s currently legal in over half of of the United States, but in both California and New York, it’s outside the scope of practice for physical therapists.

“Dry needling is probably one of the most impacting medical techniques to hit rehabilitation and recovery for years, without having the side effects of medications, surgery, and other methods,” says Zylstra.

But acupuncturists say the relief is topical—and temporary. “It’s only treating the symptom of the pain, without discovering why it’s happening,” says Blakeway. “Dry needling is like taking an aspirin to make your headache go away instead of finding out whether it’s a tension headache, or you’re dehydrated.”

The big issue of training

At their core, physical therapists and acupuncturists want the same thing: to heal patients of their daily maladies. “Dry needling is practiced by acupuncturists and chiropractors, and now physical therapists—we’re all healthcare professionals trying to get the best results,” says Blakeway. But the training each receives is vastly different.

According to the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, in order to be board certified, acupuncturists complete a four-year, full time Masters program that includes at least 3,000 hours of study, 660 clinical hours, and 350 patient visits. And they’re rigorously trained according to the body’s meridiens and channels—and where to, and not to, place a hair-thin needle.

In order to become certified in dry needling, Zylstra says physical therapists have already completed their Masters or Doctorate programs in physical therapy (or over 1,500 clinical hours), and spent two full years practicing. They then take at least one specific dry needling course for 27 hours, but many take multiple courses after that.

“KinetaCore’s standards require completion of a log of 200 treatment sessions which will result in a minimum of 800 muscles treated before taking the advanced Level 2 course,” Says Zylstra. “In all our courses, we teach the anatomy of all the muscles we’re focusing on as well as the risks associated with needling them,” says Zylstra. “You are then required to take a competency test that you’re not guaranteed to pass.”

But according to doctors on the Eastern side, that’s not enough. “Chinese medicine views the body as a whole—not just one source of random pain,” says Lonny Jarrett, a licensed acupuncturist and neurobiologist who practices in Massachusetts. “Physical therapists have no training in the deep medical implications of needling, and don’t understand the broader implications of their actions on physiology,” leading to safety concerns.

How safe is it?

Acupuncturists say that dry needling turns a noninvasive procedure in a physical therapy session into an invasive one, something PTs don’t have training for.

While it’s not common, waves have been made over nerve damage and punctured lungs caused by dry needling. Last year, Olympic freeskiier Torin Yater-Wallace was hospitalized for a collapsed lung that he attributed to dry needling treatments from his physical therapists.

“Our goal is absolute safety,” says Zylstra, who sits on two task forces focusing on dry needling competency and safety. “Dry needling is invasive, but very minimally so. Physical therapists have training in the muscular skeletal system throughout their schooling that most doctors don’t even get, unless they’re orthopedists.”

Healer whitewashing

For many healers, even if the therapy is safe, it represents a whitewashing of Eastern medicine practices to fit Western sensibilities. “I’ve heard some physical therapists say it’s a new technique that has Western origins,” says Miller. “That’s dumbing down a practice that’s 4,000 years old and taking it out of context.”

And if the two practices are routinely confused as the same thing, acupuncturists say, people will lose sight of the value of the ancient practice administered by highly-trained practitioners. “[Acupuncture] is already the low rung on the totem poll in the way people think about their option and treatment,” Jarrett says.

“It’s bad PR to have a physical therapist taking a weekend course and coming out saying they’re an acupuncturist, or having a patient say they had a bad experience with acupuncture when they really had dry needling,” Jarrett adds. “It’s like going to KFC and saying you’ve had chicken.” —Brittany Burke

Study Demonstrates That Acupuncture Useful for Heart Problems

 

Acupuncture and Chinese herbology are frequently used together to treat various types of heart disease and dysfunction and many cardiac issues are treated here, at the Northside Holistic Center. Occasionally an interesting study or report will be published which illustrates the utility of this approach. Presented here are a smattering of those studies, added to as I come across them.

A recent Chinese study found that acupuncture was useful in preventing heart damage from a drug commonly used as an anti-nausea agent, droperidol. The research, which can be read about here, found that: 

[While] droperidol is used for the treatment of postoperative and chemotherapy related nausea and vomiting but may cause heart dysfunction. Researchers speculate that the cardioprotective mechanisms of electroacupuncture at PC6 and its success in preventing droperidol side effects may be due, in part, to acupuncture’s ability to regulate the balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic tone. In the experiment, PC6 was administered as a pretreatment prior to the injection of droperidol. The researchers added, “Pretreatment of P6 EA (PC6 electroacupuncture) significantly reduced QTc prolongation induced by droperidol, and this property may be related to the up-regulation of Cx43 mRNA and protein, which may contribute to the transmural heterogeneity of repolarization and abbreviate the prolonged QT intervals in droperidol treated hearts.” This experiment demonstrates that acupuncture is an effective non-pharmaceutical approach to avoiding adverse events caused by medication therapy. 

Excerpted from an article about another study on cardiac function and acupuncture, which can be read here. 

New research from the International Society for Autonomic Neuroscience shows that acupuncture controls the heart rate and increases the strength of cardiac autonomic function. This new research indicates that the use of specific acupuncture points may help to prevent heart attacks (myocardial infarctions) and arrhythmias.

Needling acupoint CV17 decreased the heart rate and increased the power of the high-frequency component of the HRV (heart rate variability), an index of the body’s ability to maintain control of the heart beat rate and rhythm through vagus nerve activity. The researchers conclude that CV17 “causes the modulation of cardiac autonomic function.”

HRV (heart rate variability) is the variance in time interval between heart beats. Reduced HRV is linked to mortality after myocardial infarction and a lowering of HRV is also linked to congestive heart failure, diabetic neuropathy, and low survival rates in premature babies. A reduction of HRV and its high-frequency component is common in patients with PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome) and for individuals with increased heart rates due to stress.

This new research shows that the application of acupuncture to CV17 increases the power of the high-frequency component of HRV and simultaneously is able to lower the heart rate. This research demonstrates that acupuncture at CV17 is able to activate the autonomic nervous system to control the heart rate by increasing vagal activity. Depressed HRV after MI, a heart attack, reflects a decrease in vagal activity and leads to cardiac electrical instability. Since acupuncture at CV17 increases the cardiac vagal component of HRV, it may be an important acupuncture point for patients recovering from MI.

We treat many patients for heart problems such as tachycardia, brachycardia, palpitations as well as those which are secondary to other issues such as panic attacks, PTSD, menopause, as well as other idiopathic causes. This research bears out our experience.

Chinese Medicine Could Double Chances of Conceiving.

Researchers in Australia have just published a study suggesting a dramatic increase in the likelihood of conception among infertile couples with a combination of acupuncture and herbal therapy. The article, which can be read here, goes on to say:

Couples with fertility problems are twice as likely to get pregnant using traditional Chinese medicine as western drugs, say researchers.

They found a two-fold improvement in pregnancy rates over just four months of treatment from practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine.

Fertility therapy is a large part of the work that is done at the Northside Holistic Center.

Chinese Herb Enters Trials to Treat Prostate Cancer

A commonly used herb in Chinese herbal formulae, Huang Bai has entered trials for prostrate cancer at the University of Texas School of Medicine, San Antonio. An article about this can be read here.

Adanki Pratap Kumar, a professor of urology in the University of Texas School of Medicine at the Health Science Center in San Antonio, discovered in his laboratory that there was something special about the extract -- from the bark of the Amur cork tree in China -- in combination with radiation treatments that seemed to make both work much better.

It is not surprising that this ingredient, which is in many of the formulae that we make patients with specific complaints and constititutional issues, would be found useful for issues such as cancer. Traditional Chinese medicine categorizes diseases as having specific traits and prescribes acupuncture points and herbal formulae which balance these traits. Cancer often has characteristics which this ingredient would be useful in treating.