Tag: Acupuncture

Why Consider Chinese Herbal Medicine?

Posted on by Whitney Board
Chinese herbal medicine

Chinese Herbal Medicine might be able to help you if you have multiple symptoms or symptoms that are vague or hard to pinpoint. It may be able to help you if you have exhausted conventional medicine options or need to counteract side effects of medications. It can also be used a preventative medicine or for conditions that defy a Western medical diagnosis because it uses a different way at looking at health and disease. 

Here are some conditions that are commonly well treated with Chinese Herbal Medicine: 

  • Decrease cold/flu symptoms 
  • Increase your energy 
  • Improve your breathing 
  • Improve digestion
  • Improve your sleep
  • Decrease pain
  • Improve menopausal symptoms
  • Help regulate menstrual cycles (if infertility is an issue)
  • Clear up stubborn dermatological problems

Chinese herbal medicine is an important part of traditional Chinese medicine. It has been used for centuries in China, where herbal medicine is considered a primary therapy for many health issues. Like acupuncture, Chinese herbs can address unhealthy body patterns that are the root cause of a variety of symptoms and complaints. The goal is to help you regain balance in your body and to strengthen your body’s resistance to disease. Doing this will help resolve your symptoms.

How is Chinese Herbal Medicine Different?

Most forms of Western herbology and conventional medicine work in a this for that manner. If you have x condition (say a headache for example), take this medicine (aspirin, ibuprofen, or some other pain medication). While this approach can work well to get rid of the headache in the moment, it has not done anything to correct the imbalances in the body that have caused the headache.

This is the main difference between Chinese herbal and conventional medicine. It is rare that a person presents with just one symptom or complaint. More common is a variety of symptoms. If we continue with the headache example, a headache might happen along with digestive upsets, or neck pain, or around the menstrual cycle, or after an accident where the person hit their head. It might happen at a certain time of day, season, or day of the week. It likely happens on the same area of the head every time. (One of my favorite answers to where is your headache? On my head.) 

There is a reason for all of these questions when using Chinese herbal medicine. The constellation of symptoms, history, and other diagnostic tools we use (like feeling the pulse and looking at the tongue), allow us to determine the underlying pattern of disharmony in the way your body is functioning. 

This is a major difference from conventional diagnosis. Instead of honing in on one particular symptom as a standalone problem, we are looking at the body, mind, and spirit as a whole functional person where the various systems must interact and communicate properly for good health. If there is a breakdown in the interaction, symptoms or disease results.

And this is the beauty of Chinese herbal medicine. The nuanced diagnosis allows us to prescribe an herbal formula that has been researched, used, and modified for thousands of years. The formula can be modified as needed to address your individual condition.

What is a Formula is and how it can help you?

Because most of the time patients have several symptoms with their pattern of disharmony, one single herb or ingredient simply cannot do the job. 

To continue with the example of a headache sufferer, this person might be a woman who suffers from PMS symptoms, constipation around her period, neck pain, and a lot of stress. Her symptoms point to a specific pattern and the Chinese herbalist will need to use a combination of herbs to address it. Combining herbs in time tested combinations and formulas enhances their therapeutic effects and also increases the safety of use.

Thousands of years of trial and error, careful observation, and more recently pharmacological research have resulted in a reliable system of combining herbs and confirmed the efficacy and safety of using Chinese herbal formulas.

There are several ways to take Chinese herbs:

The traditional and most potent way to take Chinese herbal formulas is in a decoction, or tea. A decoction is made by cooking the raw herbs in water to pull out the active ingredients, then straining out the herbs and drinking the remaining liquid. This method is the fastest acting. It is also more expensive and some formulas don’t taste great. 

Chinese herbs can also be taken as granules or granules in capsules. These are made by concentrating and freeze drying the decoctions. They are easier and more convenient to take and are less expensive. I tend to prefer using these if possible.

These herbs can also be found in tablet form or as “teapills” (which look a little bit like pellets or BB’s). I do not prefer these forms of herbs because they are not as potent and there can be quality control issues with teapills.

Where can I get Chinese herbs?

While there are a few well known formulas that can be purchased over the counter (mostly cold formulas), the only way to experience the true benefits of Chinese herbal therapy is to consult with a skilled, licensed practitioner.  

If you are suffering from a health issue and wonder if Chinese herbal medicine can help you, please contact at Spring Integrative Health for a free 15 minute consult. 

 

Treating Headaches with Acupuncture

Posted on by Whitney Board
headaches and the brain treating migraines with acupuncture

Headaches are common. Most people experience some kind of headache from time to time. Tension, dehydration, fatigue, or the onset of an illness can trigger a headache. 

For some people, headaches are a frequent and unwelcome visitor. These headaches can be excruciating and seriously interfere with quality of life. 

Headaches in Western Medicine:

Western medicine recognizes five types of headache: tension, cluster, rebound, sinus, and migraine. Over the past twenty years or so, newer and better pharmaceuticals have been made available to lessen the impact of severe, chronic, and recurring headache. 

Unfortunately, most of these drugs have moderate to severe side effects.

Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine Approach

Chinese medicine is concerned more about where on the head the pain is and what other symptoms are occurring. This indicates to the practitioner what meridians or channels are involved and what pattern might be the underlying (root) cause. Based on that information, he/she will prescribe either acupuncture or an herbal formula, or both.

A newer area of medicine that I am particularly drawn to and have some training in, is functional medicine. Like Chinese medicine, functional medicine takes a whole person approach and looks for patterns to figure out how to help a person. Like Chinese medicine, the majority of treatment involves nutrition, herbs and acupuncture,  lifestyle, and supplements rather than pharmaceutical drugs.

Integrative Approaches Often Work Best

Many times for extremely stubborn or severe chronic headache, an integrated approach works the best. Here at Spring Integrative Health we offer acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine, nutritional consulting, naturopathic medicine, therapeutic massage, and Accunect bodywork to address almost all aspects and causes of headaches.

Types of Headaches:

Tension

Tension headaches are usually felt in the forehead, at the temples , or back of the head, and will usually go away with over the counter aspirin or ibuprofen. However, If you want to try a more natural approach, try putting steady pressure in the webbing between your first and second finger. Or, you could try rubbing a little ginger or peppermint oil into the area of the head that aches. Life style changes such as stress reduction, yoga, exercise, and meditation should also help.

Cluster

Cluster headaches tend to come on suddenly and cause severe pain on one side of the head. The eye and nose may water on that side as well. Looking for a Chinese pattern would inform the acupuncture and herbal treatment. I would look for patterns in onset, diet, location,  and co-occurring events. Lab tests might identify markers that would help determine if a nutritional deficit or other imbalance was involved.

Sinus

Sinus headaches often accompany sinus infections and other conditions that feature blocked sinuses. These headaches usually occur in the forehead area, but the pain and pressure can radiate outward from there. Sometimes a change in weather will trigger them. One of the key features of this type of headache is the pressure that goes with the pain. 

Integrated Approach to healing a Sinus Headache:

Acupuncture is very useful in relieving the pressure in the sinuses, while an antibiotic or possibly a naturopathic remedy might be used to treat the actual bacterial infection. In addition a Chinese herbal formula could be used to strengthen the immune system and clear any lingering pathogens, as well as address the underlying disharmony that is weakening the immune system.

Rebound

A rebound headache is caused by medication. Or overuse/dependence on certain kinds of medication. Ibuprofen, aspirin, acetaminophen, and prescription headache drugs can all cause a rebound headache. If you notice that your headaches are increasing even on the medication, chances are you are getting rebound headaches. The fix for this is using none or less of the offending drug. Acupuncture can be used to manage the headaches while the body readjusts itself.

Migraines

Migraines are often the most debilitating of headache types. Severe pain lasting 4-72 hours, throbbing, nausea and/or vomiting, and sound or light sensitivity are all part of the migraine experience. Sometimes there is a clear trigger for migraine such as wine, or chocolate (sorry to say), certain types of cheese. Avoiding these substances can really help. 

Some women suffer from menstrual migraines caused by hormonal imbalance and the hormonal swings that take place just prior to the onset of their cycle.

Migraine Triggers

Often a trigger is difficult to identify. Because Chinese medicine looks at patterns of disharmony, we examine such factors as: the location of the headache on the head, known triggers, sleep patterns, hormone balance, gut health, food sensitivities, and nutritional status. By looking at these factors I can search for clues to why the headaches are occurring. 

Treatment often involves both an herbal formula and acupuncture as well as some lifestyle and dietary modifications with prescription pharmaceuticals waiting in the wings if needed. Most of the time this approach to treatment results in fewer and milder headaches that continue to diminish in both frequency and severity with treatment.

Never Experienced Headaches Before?

It is a good idea to see your doctor to rule out more serious medical conditions before starting treatment for headaches. If you are experiencing “the worst headache of my life,” particularly if you don’t typically get severe headaches, head to the emergency room to rule out life threatening conditions.

Let’s get Healing!

Headaches are a problem that are near and dear to my heart. After all, if I hadn’t suffered debilitating headaches all those years ago, would I have ever tried and used acupuncture? So, those awful headaches turned out to be a good thing!

 

What’s the Deal with Sleep?

Posted on by Whitney Board

Sleep is vital to radiant health and well-being. Even though we don’t yet understand everything that sleep does for us, we know it plays a major role in maintaining our, mental, emotional, and physical health.

Memory and Brain Health

  • While you sleep, your brain is busy. The glymphatic system is a newly discovered waste clearance system in our brain and central nervous system. It is similar to the lymphatic that does the same thing in the rest of our bodies.
  • The glymphatic system works mainly while we sleep to remove toxic substances and waste products as well as deliver nutrients to our brains.
  • This may be why sleep plays such an important role in memory. Researchers at Harvard Medical School have found that adequate sleep dramatically improves the ability to learn a new task and consolidate memories. It spurs creativity.
  • It also contributes to emotional stability and good decision making skills.
  • Lack of sleep negatively affects mood, motivation and judgment and is implicated in depression, anxiety, irritability, and other mood disorders.

Physical Health

There are so many physical benefits to sleep (see the following):

  • Your immune system depends on enough sleep to function at it’s best.
  • Sleep is when your body heals and repairs itself, helping to curb inflammation.
  • Long-term sleep deprivation is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attacks, strokes, high blood pressure, and kidney disease.
  • Because sleep is important for regulation proper blood sugar, chronic sleep deprivation is implicated in diabetes.
  • Sleep is needed for proper hormone balance.
  • Sleep is also a major factor in weight gain. When the body is not getting adequate sleep, the hunger and satiety hormones get out of kilter. You guessed it: the hunger hormone, ghrelin, levels go up while the satiety (signaling you are full) hormone, leptin, goes down. The result: your appetite signals are skewed and you are more hungry and probably are going to eat more than you need to.

Quality of Life

Everyone knows that you just plain feel and look better when you are sleeping well. Turns out, you are more productive, less accident prone, and live longer as well. It can be hard to get enough sleep!

Sleep deprivation is a major problem in our country. But before you go reaching for a sleep aid (some of which are suspected of interfering with the glymphatic system along with a host of other side effects), please give some serious effort to proven lifestyle changes that aid the sleep process.

First of all, you need to make time for sleep. That means 7-9 hours every night. It works best if you can go to bed and get up roughly the same time every day. Our bodies like their sleep, like their meals, on a regular schedule. A lot of health gurus recommend a 10pm bedtime and a 6 am wakeup, but this is a guideline and you may need to adjust it by an hour or two for your lifestyle.

Insomnia

Many people get into bed but can’t get to sleep. Others may fall asleep right away, but then wake up and then can’t get back to sleep. And the worst part of this is that it tends to be the same night after night. The sleep pattern is off.

You have probably heard most of the usual recommendations about eating earlier, avoiding upsetting topics at night, making time to wind down, making sure your bedroom is completely dark and not too hot. These are all great.

Stress reduction techniques such as meditation, time in nature, warm baths can also make a big difference.

Some recent research has shown that light plays a major role in how our brains and sleep hormones function.

One of the best ways to help reset the pattern is to get outside, morning light as soon as possible after you wake up. Stay outside as long as you can, but at least for a few minutes. This begins to shift the sleep/wake hormones into a more normal pattern.

The blue light that is emitted from electronic devices (phones, computers, televisions) can also disrupt our sleep/wake cycles and cause insomnia. The current recommendation is to avoid all screen time for two hours before bed. If this is not doable for you, be sure to put your phone on the “night shift” setting and download software that greatly diminishes the blue light coming from your computer. Flux https://justgetflux.com/is the one I use on my Mac or you can get SunSet Screen http://www.skytopia.com/software/sunsetscreen/) for your PC. Both of these apps are free and easy to install.

If these measures don’t help or help only a little, acupuncture and Chinese medicine can help, and without weird side effects. As always in Chinese medicine, one size does NOT fit all. There are many time test3ed formulas that really help sleep, but they must be fitted to the pattern of disharmony. There are formulas for difficulty getting to sleep, difficulty staying asleep, difficulty getting back to sleep, nightmares, disturbing the sleep, hot flashes and night sweats waking you, etc.

Re-establishing a healthy and restorative sleep pattern is one of the best things you can do for your health. Click here to see how I can help!

 

If you would like to request an appointment for acupuncture please click on the Contact Tab on our home page or click here to be taken there directly.

 

What is Cupping? And why is it good for you?

Posted on by Whitney Board

Those bubbly things are cups and I admit they do look a little weird. These days you’re likely to see the tell tale, but temporary, large rounds marks made by cups on celebrities like Jennifer Anniston, Gwyneth Paltrow, or David Arquette, but the reality is that it is one of the oldest methods of medical treatment known in the world.

Cupping was practiced by the Chinese, as well as ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern cultures.  

I was surprised to see a set of bamboo cups on display in the doctor’s office at the Old Salem Living History Museum in Winston Salem, NC. Apparently the pre-Revolutionary Moravian doctors knew a thing or two about this interesting and effective treatment modality.

Why would anyone want to do that?

Good question. For one, it’s relaxing. Sort of like a deep tissue massage without the pressure. A flame or a pump is used to create a vacuum that suctions the cups onto the skin. Depending on the condition being treated, the cups are either stationary or slid on the skin to massage a larger area. The suction mobilizes the flow of blood, lymph, and that elusive thing known as qi to promote the healing of a wide range of problems: Tight shoulders and neck, low back pain, headaches, some types of tendonitis, gastro-intestinal, and respiratory problems.

A Case Study:

One of the most effective uses for cupping is respiratory conditions. Lingering cough, asthma, bronchitis, even the common cold respond well to cupping therapy. When my daughter was in college, she came down with a bad case of the respiratory bug that was running rampant through the dorms before finals. Not wanting to bring needles and a Sharps box into the dorm, I arrived with my set of cups.

A pale and sweaty face greeted me as she opened the door and a deep cough racked her body.  She didn’t need to say “I feel awful,” but she did anyway. After a review of her symptoms to rule out a more serious bacterial infection, she laid face down on her bed. I affixed the cups to her upper back amidst questions like will this leave a mark? (Yes, but it won’t hurt and will only last a few days), will this work? (Probably will help, won’t hurt).

The cups drew so much heat out of her body, they fogged up. My daughter fell in to a deep sleep for the first time in days. Twenty minutes later, when she awoke and I removed the cups from her back, she took a deep breath without coughing. After a brief look of surprise, she smiled. “Huh.”

“Feel a little better?”

“Yeah. That was weird, but I do feel better.”

She made a rapid recovery after that and had no problem showing up for her final exams.

Obviously, not all cupping sessions produce such dramatic results, but time and again, it has proved to be an effective therapy for both acute and long-time problems.

Please contact me if you have more questions about cupping or are interested in discussing your individual condition-406-586-2626 or contact me here on Spring’s website through the Contact tab!

 

Dr. Holly Thompson

 

Skin-Brain Connection?

Posted on by Whitney Board

Eastern medicine has always considered skin conditions to be external indicators of internal conditions, and recognized the importance of the gut in all aspects of health. All Chinese herbal formulas for skin problems are based on resolving the internal disharmony that is behind the outbreak.

The long and very successful history of Chinese herbal medicine for dermatological issues speaks to the efficacy of this approach. Like all problems in Chinese medicine, the signs and symptoms and details of the whole person are taken into account to determine a particular pattern that is at the root of the problem. Treatment is designed to address the problem at both the level of the root and the symptom. Typically, this is done with both internal (herbal formula) and external (topical medicine and/or acupuncture) treatment.

Western medicine has traditionally looked to resolve skin issues with topical medications or steroids, and not looked for internal reasons for conditions such as acne.

But, it wasn’t always this way.

Seventy years ago, two dermatologists, John Stokes and Donald Pillsbury, proposed a gastro-intestinal mechanism for overlapping anxiety, depression, and skin conditions such as acne. Stokes and Pillsbury hypothesized that emotional states might alter the normal intestinal microflora, increase intestinal permeability and contribute to systemic inflammation. They experimented with probiotics to correct the microbiome.

For whatever reasons, Stokes and Pillsbury’s work fell by the wayside.

Until recently.

The microbiome (mostly gut flora-the good and not-so-good bugs that live in our intestines) and all its possible influences are currently amongst the most researched areas in medicine. As part of  that research, the gut-brain-skin connection is again being studied. There have been a number of studies in Europe that indicate probiotics can be effective in the treatment of acne. Studies done in Russia and Italy found that giving the probiotic bacteria L. acidophilus and B. bifidum to acne sufferers improved outcomes and accelerated the time needed for standard therapies to work.

Another study found that giving a lactobacillus-fermented dairy drink improved acne over the course of 12 weeks. While all this research is wonderful and confirms what we have known in both Chinese medicine for some time, the problem is that it will be years until this knowledge will be put into use in standard conventional medicine. We have the ability, today, to use  time-tested Chinse Medicine Dermatolgy to treat skin problems at the root for lasting results.

If you are suffering from acne, or other skin conditions such as rosacea, eczema, or unexplained rashes and want to deal with it at the root cause level, give the office a call or send me a message today!

Dr. Holly Thompson

 

 

Acupuncture to Battle the Cold and Flu Season

Posted on by Whitney Board

Along with all the wonderful things about this time of year, lots of activities, playing in the snow, and visitors dropping in to ski for the weekend, we can also experience stress, overwhelm, colds and flu. It often seems like these intruders sneak up and attack and there’s nothing we can really do about it.

Not true. Taking excellent care of yourself, scheduling down time, getting enough sleep, and staying hydrated can all go along way in keeping you feeling your best. Today we’re going to focus on colds and flu.

Even with the best self-care, a particularly virulent cold virus can still make it through your body’s defenses.

Are you doomed to a week or ten days of misery?

Not necessarily.

First of all, pay attention to the signals your body is sending. Is there a slight scratchiness in your throat? Or do you typically get a headache, fatigue, and general achiness?

You can give your immune system a quick boost with fresh ginger tea. Take a few slices of fresh ginger root (I use a couple of ¼-1/2 “ slices and smash them with the side of  a knife-you could also grate it), a squeeze of lemon, and a teaspoon of honey and place them in a mug. Pour in very hot water and steep for about five minutes. Breathe in the steam, relax, and sip slowly. Fresh ginger tea is both soothing and amazingly effective at boosting the immune system.

In Chinese medicine, we recognize several types of colds, and have several well-developed and time-tested herbal formulas used to fight them. Taking a few loading doses of the correct formula (I really like Cold Quell) at the very first whisper of symptoms will often avert the illness. If the cold does take hold, it should be shorter and less severe than it would have been.

Acupuncture can also be amazingly effective in warding off a cold or help you feel better if you’re already sick. Don’t cancel an appointment if you’re not feeling well! A treatment will help you feel better and get better faster.

My hope is that you will have a happy and healthy winter season, but if a cold or flu threatens, please give me a call for some help here at Spring.

 

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