The World Health Organization (WHO) has brought together a team of experts from Japan, China, and South Korea to standardize acupuncture points. The 2,000-year-old Chinese therapy is now used around the world, but there are placement discrepancies for 92 of the 361 basic points on the body. (Traditionally, there are 365 acupuncture points; the WHO recognizes 361.)
Albert Schatz, Ph.D., an icon in the massage profession, died Jan. 17 just days before his 85th birthday on Feb. 2.
To help reduce the more than 98,000 U.S. deaths resulting from medication errors, a new protocol has been adopted by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. The practice reduces incorrect pharmaceutical use by ensuring that healthcare professionals are aware of all their patients’ medications, rather than just those being used for the condition currently under examination. A comprehensive list of patients’ medications helps doctors avoid potentially lethal interactions.
Rather than trying to challenge an Alzheimer’s patient’s delusions, caregivers should empathize and connect emotionally, according to Joanne Koenig Coste, author of Learning to Speak Alzheimer’s (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). This is especially relevant because patients have strong emotional memories, even after they’ve lost the ability to remember current events.
Following are some tips for caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients, as reported in a recent issue of the Harvard Health Letter.
Protecting the immune system and managing stress are vital aspects of living longer, feeling younger, and being healthy. Here are 10 ways to reduce stress, boost your immune system, and slow down the hands of time.
Physical activity. Regular exercise — whether it’s walking or dancing — strengthens your cardiovascular system, heart, muscles, and bones. It also stimulates the release of endorphins; improves mental functioning, concentration/attention, and cognitive performance; and lowers cholesterol, blood pressure, cortisol, and other stress hormones.
In a handful of hospitals across the country, patients are being treated to a new level of healthcare where massage, reflexology, water therapies, and even body wraps and facials are par for the course. It’s happening in hospital-based spas, a venue where sound medical focus and the power of complementary therapies combine to create a comprehensive, well-rounded approach to healing.
Much of what we have learned over the past decade about the physiological and psychological effects of massage therapy has been generated by researchers at the Touch Research Institute (TRI) in Miami, Fla. Their investigations cover a wide range of medical conditions, subjects, and ages, in a variety of applications. We know from these studies, for instance, that massage appears to reduce anxiety and depression, positively alter biochemical markers, and stimulate growth in preterm infants.
I’ve followed the spa market since the late 1980s, when I wrote my first spa feature for a consumer fitness magazine. Since then, I think I’ve undergone every spa therapy available. I’ve had my body wrapped in chocolate, painted in paraffin, doused with a variety of liquids, and scrubbed with herb-infused salts and sugars. I’ve detoxed in traditional Mexican sweat lodges and sat in henna-infused sitz baths in Malaysia. I’ve had mud wraps in Italy, sipped the spa waters in Baden-Baden and Evian, and have had more facials than I can count.
Recently, spas have been trending toward beverages with a variety of healing properties, including the ability to flush out bodily toxins, increase blood flow, and provide energy. Perhaps most interesting, these drinks are worldly concoctions and bring with them mystical qualities from the global regions in which they originate.
Massage therapists elicit an impressive level of goodwill and increasing popularity among American adults. Fully two out of five adults have visited a massage therapist and 12 percent received at least one massage in 2004, putting massage on par with consumer use of chiropractic and physical therapy services.
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