Acupuncture is great for anyone wanting to get well and stay well. When I talk to people about acupuncture they often say, that sounds great! I will definitely give it a try when something is wrong with me. When you are not at your optimal health, it is true; acupuncture is a safe and effective treatment. You may know that the national institutes of health (NIH) and the world health organization (WHO) have recognized acupuncture as a viable treatment for over 50 symptoms and aliments including: anxiety, fertility issues, pms, back and head ache as well as many others. What you may not know is that acupuncture is also a great way to stay healthy. Yes, there have been studies to prove that acupuncture can improve your immunity (study by the American College of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine and Department of Health & Human Performance at the University of Houston 2007) but I am talking about total wellness body, mind, and spirit.

What is total wellness? Total wellness is when you can pause at the stresses of life (an ache here, a bad day there). Instead of the stresses being a part of the big picture of your life they are just a little, “huh, look at that!” Not only do you benefit, but the people around you benefit as well. Your partner does not get snapped at for leaving the dishes in the sink and you have all the patience in the world for your three year old at 6am (even if you are not a morning person).

Acupuncture works as a gentle reminder that you know exactly how to stay healthy and all of your symptoms are your teachers (we all have symptoms even when we are well). The benefits are better sleep, more awareness of your body, feeling relaxed, more energy and those are just a few of the side effects!

Acupuncture can help you live your life with greater ease. If you have any questions about how acupuncture can help you please email us info@arborhealing.com or call us (301) 298-5228 and we will come up with a plan to help you relax and enjoy your journey to greater health and wellness.

Author Ngina Shulman, M.Ac., L.Ac., is the co-owner of the Arbor Center for Acupuncture.

Practitioners whose educational focus is in Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine receive
approximately 80% of their training exclusively in this field, and undergo an extensive
clinical internship averaging 3 years. Other healthcare practitioners may use acupuncture,
which is one of the many therapies of Oriental Medicine, as an adjunct to their primary
practice. While all of these practitioners also have training in western medical sciences,
this chart is designed to illustrate the varying levels of acupuncture training generally
undertaken by healthcare professionals.

For a list of ACAOM-approved colleges and national education and training standards, see www.acaom.org.

For a list of CCAOM member colleges, all of which are ACAOM-approved, see www.ccaom.org.

For national certification standards, see www.nccaom.org.

*Many Acupuncture & Oriental Medical schools exceed 2000 hours.

**Acupuncture/Oriental Medical practitioners are able to obtain a D.A.O.M. doctoral degree from an ACAOM-approved clinical doctoral program. Some states also designate the licensing title (non-degree) as D.O.M. or D.Ac, or Acupuncture Physician. Licensed Acupuncturists may have also obtained an O.M.D., Ph.D., or D.Ac. for non-extensive post-graduate training (from unaccredited programs). Thus, it is important to ask where such a title was received.

***Some medical doctors and chiropractors are trained and licensed in both western and Oriental medical acupuncture. Ask your physician about his or her credentials. Acupuncture should only be administered by a practitioner who has specific training in this field, due to risk of improper needling, inadequate understanding of Oriental medical diagnostic procedures, transmission of disease, imbalancing of energy, or ethical violations.

Produced by the Council of Colleges of Acupuncture & Oriental Medicine (CCAOM). For reprint information contact 301-476-7790 or executivedirector@ccaom.org. For information about the Council please see our web site at www.ccaom.org

Deepak Chopra – January 09, 2009

Co-authored by Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy and Andrew Weil

In mid-February, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the Bravewell Collaborative are convening a “Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public.” This is a watershed in the evolution of integrative medicine, a holistic approach to health care that uses the best of conventional and alternative therapies such as meditation, yoga, acupuncture and herbal remedies. Many of these therapies are now scientifically documented to be not only medically effective but also cost effective.

President-elect Barack Obama and former Sen. Tom Daschle (the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services) understand that if we want to make affordable health care available to the 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance, then we need to address the fundamental causes of health and illness, and provide incentives for healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing only drugs and surgery.

Heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, breast cancer and obesity account for 75% of health-care costs, and yet these are largely preventable and even reversible by changing diet and lifestyle. As Mr. Obama states in his health plan, unveiled during his campaign: “This nation is facing a true epidemic of chronic disease. An increasing number of Americans are suffering and dying needlessly from diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma and HIV/AIDS, all of which can be delayed in onset if not prevented entirely.”

The latest scientific studies show that our bodies have a remarkable capacity to begin healing, and much more quickly than we had once realized, if we address the lifestyle factors that often cause these chronic diseases. These studies show that integrative medicine can make a powerful difference in our health and well-being, how quickly these changes may occur, and how dynamic these mechanisms can be.

Many people tend to think of breakthroughs in medicine as a new drug, laser or high-tech surgical procedure. They often have a hard time believing that the simple choices that we make in our lifestyle — what we eat, how we respond to stress, whether or not we smoke cigarettes, how much exercise we get, and the quality of our relationships and social support — can be as powerful as drugs and surgery. But they often are. And in many instances, they’re even more powerful.

These studies often used high-tech, state-of-the-art measures to prove the power of simple, low-tech, and low-cost interventions. Integrative medicine approaches such as plant-based diets, yoga, meditation, and psychosocial support may stop or even reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, prostate cancer, obesity, hypercholesterolemia, and other chronic conditions.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that these approaches may even change gene expressionin hundreds of genes in only a few months. Genes associated with cancer, heart disease, and inflammation were downregulated or “turned off” whereas protective genes were upregulated or “turned on.” A study published in The Lancet Oncology reported that these changes increase telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. Even drugs have not been shown to do this.

Our “health-care system” is primarily a disease-care system. Last year, $2.1 trillion were spent in the U.S. on medical care, or 16.5% of the gross national product. Of these trillions, 95 cents of every dollar was spent to treat disease after it had already occurred. At least 75% of these costs were spent on treating chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes that are preventable or even reversible.

The choices are especially clear in cardiology. In 2006, for example, according to data provided by the American Heart Association, 1.3 million coronary angioplasty procedures were performed at an average cost of $48,399 each, or more than $60 billion; and 448,000 coronary bypass operations were performed at a cost of $99,743 each, or more than $44 billion. In other words, Americans spent more than $100 billion in 2006 for these two procedures alone.

Despite these costs, a randomized controlled trial published in April 2007 in The New England Journal of Medicine found that angioplasties and stents do not prolong life or even prevent heart attacks in stable patients (i.e., 95% of those who receive them). Coronary bypass surgery prolongs life in less than 3% of patients who receive it. So, Medicare and other insurers and individuals pay billions for surgical procedures like angioplasty and bypass surgery that are usually dangerous, invasive, expensive, and largely ineffective. Yet they pay very little — if any money at all — for integrative medicine approaches that have been proven to reverse and prevent most chronic diseases that account for at least 75% of health-care costs. The INTERHEART study, published in September 2004 in The Lancet, followed 30,000 men and women on six continents and found that changing lifestyle could prevent at least 90% of all heart disease.

That bears repeating: The disease that accounts for more premature deaths and costs Americans more than any other illness is almost completely preventable simply by changing diet and lifestyle. And the same lifestyle changes that can prevent or even reverse heart disease also help prevent or reverse many other chronic diseases as well. Chronic pain is one of the major sources of worker’s compensation claims costs, yet studies show that it is often susceptible to acupuncture and Qi Gong. Herbs usually have far fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals.

Joy, pleasure, and freedom are sustainable, deprivation and austerity are not. When you eat a healthier diet, quit smoking, exercise, meditate and have more love in your life, then your brain receives more blood and oxygen, so you think more clearly, have more energy, need less sleep. Your brain may grow so many new neurons that it could get measurably bigger in only a few months. Your face gets more blood flow, so your skin glows more and wrinkles less. Your heart gets more blood flow, so you have more stamina and can even begin to reverse heart disease. Your sexual organs receive more blood flow, so you may become more potent — similar to the way that circulation-increasing drugs like Viagra work. For many people, these are choices worth making — not just to live longer, but also to live better.

It’s time to move past the debate of alternative medicine versus traditional medicine, and to focus on what works, what doesn’t, for whom, and under which circumstances. It will take serious government funding to find out, but these findings may help reduce costs and increase health.

Integrative medicine approaches bring together those in red states and blue states, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, because these are human issues. They are both medically effective and, important in our current economic climate, cost effective. These approaches emphasize both personal responsibility and the opportunity to make affordable, quality health care available to those who most need it. Mr. Obama should make them an integral part of his health plan as soon as possible.

Dr. Chopra, the author of more than 50 books on the mind, body and spirit, is guest faculty at Beth Israel Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Dean Ornish, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. His most recent book is The Spectrum (Random House, 2007). Mr. Roy is a professor at Penn State and Arizona State University. Dr. Weil is director of the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.

This post originally appeared in today’s Wall Street Journal.

By John Ikerd, BS, MS, PhD, Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri
(Published in Sustaining People through Agriculture column, Small Farm Today, July/August, 2001 issue.)

At a recent organic farming conference in Winnipeg, Canada, a woman in the audience stood up and said: “Organic foods are not going to become popular with mainstream consumers until they became quick, convenient, and cheap.” My immediate response was that true organic foods were not going to be quick, convenient, or cheap — at least not for some time to come. Fortunately, more and more people are finding organic foods to be worth the time, effort, and money. The comment, however, has caused me to think further about the nature of our food system and about what we have done to try to make foods quick, convenient, and cheap for consumers.

First, at the farm level, our never-ending quest for cheap food is the root cause of the transformation of American Agriculture from a system of small, diversified, independently operated, family farms into a system of large-scale, industrialized, corporately controlled agribusinesses. The production technologies that supported specialization, mechanization, and ultimately, large-scale, contract production, were all developed to make agriculture more efficient – to make food cheaper for consumers. Millions of American farmers have been forced off the land, those remaining are sacrificing their independence, and thousands of small farming communities have withered and died – all for the sake of cheap food.

These were the consequences of progress, so we were told. The agricultural establishment has boasted loudly that ever fewer farmers have been able to feed a growing nation with an ever-decreasing share of consumer income spent for food. The increases in economic efficiency have been impressive, but what about the human costs. Economists have totaled up tremendous savings for consumers from lower food costs, but they have never bothered to place a value on the lives of farm families that have been destroyed by the loss of their farms, their way of life, and their heritage. They have never bothered to consider the value of the lives of rural people – with roots in rural schools, churches, and businesses – who were forced to abandon their communities as farm families were forced off the land. The human costs of cheap food have been undeniably tremendous, but since they couldn’t be measured in dollars and cents, they have gone uncounted.

The ecological costs of cheap food, likewise not measurable in dollars and cents, also have gone uncounted, and thus, largely ignored. Today, only the most diehard industrialists bother to deny that we have degraded the productivity of the land through erosion and contamination, and that we have polluted the natural environment with agricultural chemicals – in our never-ending pursuit of cheaper food. Certainly, we had soil erosion in the “dust bowl” days, but we were making great strides in soil conservation, before the dawning of industrial agriculture in the late 1940s. In spite of stepped up soil conservation efforts of the 1990s, American farms still are losing topsoil at rates far exceeding rates of soil regeneration. Feeble efforts to control soil loss through reduced tillage leave farmers increasingly reliant on herbicides that pollute our streams and groundwater and that disrupt or destroy the biological life in the soil.

All life on earth is rooted in the soil. As farmers destroy the natural productivity of the land, they are destroying the ability of the earth to support life. We are destroying the future of humanity to make agriculture more “efficient.” What is the value of the future of humanity? Are we in fact willing to risk the future of human life on earth just so we can have cheap food?

With increasing corporate control of agriculture we may be approaching an end of agriculture in America – at least agriculture as we know it. The globalization of agriculture, through “free-trade” agreements, means that food in the future will be grown wherever in the world it can be produced at the lowest economic cost. High costs of land and labor in the US – consequences of favorable employment opportunities and the urban-to-rural population migration — may keep production costs in the US well above costs in other food producing regions of the world. The multinational food corporations that increasingly control agriculture are not people – they have no heart, no soul, nor citizenship in any particular country. They will produce or buy agricultural commodities wherever they can produce or buy at the lowest cost, without regard for national origin. Our continuing quest for cheap food could mean the end of American agriculture.

The US in the future could well become as dependent on the rest of the world for food as we are today for oil. Economists argue that it doesn’t matter where our food is produced. If producing food elsewhere in the world will be cheaper, we will all be better off without agriculture in the US. But how long will it be before an OFEC (Organization of Food Exporting Countries) is formed to restrict world food supplies causing our food prices to skyrocket – just as we have seen skyrocketing prices of gasoline. Perhaps we can keep food imports flowing — through our military might, if economic coercion fails. But, what will be the real costs? How many small wars will we have to fight, and how many people will we be “forced to kill” – just for the sake of cheap food? Can we afford the real costs of cheap food?

The costs of making food quick and convenient probably are no less that the cost of making food cheap. Nearly eighty cents of each dollar Americans spend for food goes to pay for marketing services – processing, packaging, transportation, storage, advertising, etc. All of these costs are associated with making our food convenient – getting it into the most convenient form and package, getting it to the most convenient location, at the most convenient time, and convincing us to buy it. So, we pay far more for the convenience of our food than we pay for the food itself. In fact, we pay more to those who “package and advertise” our food than we pay to the farmers who produce it. So by far the greatest part of the total cost of food is the cost of convenience.

Our addiction to convenience also is placing control of our food supply in the hands of a few giant, multinational corporations. As Dr. Bill Heffernan of the University of Missouri has pointed out previously in Small Farm Today, the global food supply today is dominated by a handful of giant agribusiness firms, allied by various means, forming three “global food clusters.” These firms influence and, in many cases, control nearly everything that happens to our food because they control the processes that make our food “convenient.” The price of convenient food is not just the eighty cents of each dollar we spend for food. The greatest cost of convenient food has been the loss of control of our food supply.

The costs of quick food are similar in nature to the costs of convenience food. Our growing addiction of “fast food” is evident in the ever increasing share of our food dollar spent at restaurants and other eating establishments – a share approaching half of total food purchases. And, “fast foods” places, such as McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, account for nearly half of all food consumed away from home. Erick Schlosser, in his recent best seller, “Fast Food Nation,” addresses the cost of our “love affair” with fast foods. He states that “fast food has triggered the homogenization of our society. Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widening of the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled the juggernaut of American cultural imperialism abroad.” He documents how quick food has lured us into choosing diets deficient in nearly everything except calories, supporting practices deceptive in every aspect from advertising to flavoring, and systems that degrade nearly everyone and everything involved in the process.

The fast food industry has lured low-income consumers, along with the affluent, into paying ridiculously high prices for low-quality meats, potatoes, vegetable oil, and sugar. However, the high dollar-and-cent costs are but the tip of the iceberg. The true costs of quick food must include the costs of poor health, lost dignity in work, degraded landscapes, and ethical and moral decay in business matters, including international trade and investment. We are paying a tremendously high price for the time saved by choosing quick food.

Thankfully, we still have alternatives – at least for many of the things we eat. We can buy from local farmers who are committed to producing foods by ecologically sound and socially responsible means – i.e. sustainable agriculture. We can locate such farmers through “community food circles,” which provide directories of local producers who sell direct to consumers. We can “shop” at farmers markets, join CSAs, seek out restaurants that buy from local farmers, or buy those few items in the supermarkets that are supplied by local sustainable growers.

The food we buy from these local people may not be as quick, convenient, or cheap as the food we could buy at a local fast food joint or supermarket. But, it may well be more than worth the time, effort, and money that we have to spend to get it. A friend of mine is fond of saying, “eating is a moral act.” It is. The food we choose has an impact upon the lives of other people, upon the earth, and upon the future of humanity. When all of the costs are counted, we simply cannot afford the high costs of cheap food.