Iris Bell MD PhD

Integrative Health For Natural Healing

Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Acupuncture May Help Depression During Pregnancy

Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Integrative Medicine

Doctor uses needles for treatment of the patient
Doctor uses needles for treatment of the patient

One of the agonizing choices that any expectant mother faces is whether or not to take medications during pregnancy for conditions that develop during the nine months. What if they find some problem or birth defect that the drug could cause — but they learn about it years after the pregancy is over.

Now a new study from Stanford University in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology has shown that acupuncture could provide an alternative to drugs for depression during pregnancy.  Acupuncture needs much more study for its safety, but as many proponents will tell you, it has a track record covering thousands of years (compared with just a few years for many drugs on the market today).  The study compared tailored acupuncture with two types of control groups, one getting acupuncture in points believed to be unrelated to the specific depression problem and one group getting massage.  This isn’t to say that massage might not be a great way to relax and unwind, but it may not provide the kind of help with mood problems that you might get from trying a course of acupuncture.

As with any alternative or over the counter treatment, check with your own physician to make sure the treatment is OK in terms of safety for you. But, now, at least, there is a potential option available for women who need help with depressed mood while pregnant but who do not want to create uncertain lifetime risks for their unborn child during development from the medications. Check out acupuncture instead.

Myo-Inositol for Lung Cancer Prevention?

Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Diet, Vitamins

The B vitamin-related natural substance, myo-inositol is in the news lately. Now new research suggests that changes in a set of genes that are active in smokers who go on to develop lung cancer might offer early detection and even prevention treatments. Once cancer is initiated, the factors that promote it can differ from those that initiate it.

In any event, the gene involved is called PI3K, which interacts with inositol. Patients in a trial of inositol for lung cancer prevention apparently showed reductions in the activation of the PI3K. So, inositol may tell the genetic and cellular changes that precede full expression of lung cancer to stand down and halt their progression toward disease.

Sounds worth exploring.  As always, who knows if inositol would have actual clinical benefits and low risk, and it is up to each person at risk of cancer or with cancer now to decide at this point in time if the current unknowns about inositol are worth dealing with sooner rather than later (as usual, myo-inositol is widely available over the counter in health food stores). This is worth a discussion with your doctor, though, if lung cancer (or some other cancers where inositol might be helpful) is a concern for you.

Here’s the whole abstract about this latest study:

Sci Transl Med. 2010 Apr 7;2(26):26ra25.

Airway PI3K Pathway Activation Is an Early and Reversible Event in Lung Cancer Development.

Gustafson AM, Soldi R, Anderlind C, Scholand MB, Qian J, Zhang X, Cooper K, Walker D, McWilliams A, Liu G, Szabo E, Brody J, Massion PP, Lenburg ME, Lam S, Bild AH, Spira A.

Section of Computational Biomedicine, Department of Medicine and Pulmonary Center, Boston University Medical Center, Boston, MA 02118, USA.

Abstract

Although only a subset of smokers develop lung cancer, we cannot determine which smokers are at highest risk for cancer development, nor do we know the signaling pathways altered early in the process of tumorigenesis in these individuals. On the basis of the concept that cigarette smoke creates a molecular field of injury throughout the respiratory tract, this study explores oncogenic pathway deregulation in cytologically normal proximal airway epithelial cells of smokers at risk for lung cancer. We observed a significant increase in a genomic signature of phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway activation in the cytologically normal bronchial airway of smokers with lung cancer and smokers with dysplastic lesions, suggesting that PI3K is activated in the proximal airway before tumorigenesis. Further, PI3K activity is decreased in the airway of high-risk smokers who had significant regression of dysplasia after treatment with the chemopreventive agent myo-inositol, and myo-inositol inhibits the PI3K pathway in vitro. These results suggest that deregulation of the PI3K pathway in the bronchial airway epithelium of smokers is an early, measurable, and reversible event in the development of lung cancer and that genomic profiling of these relatively accessible airway cells may enable personalized approaches to chemoprevention and therapy. Our work further suggests that additional lung cancer chemoprevention trials either targeting the PI3K pathway or measuring airway PI3K activation as an intermediate endpoint are warranted.

Inositol Related Product for Better Quality of Life in Breast Cancer Survivors

Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Vitamins

Here’s a recent abstract on a study suggesting that an inositol product might improve quality of life for breast cancer survivors.  Myo-inositol is a lesser known type of B complex vitamin that the body can produce from glucose, but can be found in some nutritional supplements.

J Exp Clin Cancer Res. 2010 Feb 12;29:12.

Efficacy of IP6 + inositol in the treatment of breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy: prospective, randomized, pilot clinical study.

Baci? I, Druzijani? N, Karlo R, Skifi? I, Jagi? S.

Department of Surgery, General Hospital Zadar, 23000 Zadar, Croatia.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Prospective, randomized, pilot clinical study was conducted to evaluate the beneficial effects of inositol hexaphosphate (IP6) + Inositol in breast cancer patients treated with adjuvant therapy. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Patients with invasive ductal breast cancer where polychemotherapy was indicated were monitored in the period from 2005-2007. Fourteen patients in the same stage of ductal invasive breast cancer were involved in the study, divided in two randomized groups. One group was subjected to take IP6 + Inositol while the other group was taking placebo. In both groups of patients the same laboratory parameters were monitored. When the treatment was finished, all patients have filled questionnaires QLQ C30 and QLQ-BR23 to determine the quality of life. RESULTS: Patients receiving chemotherapy, along with IP6 + Inositol did not have cytopenia, drop in leukocyte and platelet counts. Red blood cell counts and tumor markers were unaltered in both groups. However, patients who took IP6 + Inositol had significantly better quality of life (p = 0.05) and functional status (p = 0.0003) and were able to perform their daily activities. CONCLUSION: IP6 + Inositol as an adjunctive therapy is valuable help in ameliorating the side effects and preserving quality of life among the patients treated with chemotherapy.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Evaluating Your Progress

Complementary and Alternative Medicine

What to Look For

doctorandpatienttalkingIn conventional (local, body part) medicine, the changes that you should expect are control of symptoms or problems in whatever local body part the treatment is targeting. Other changes are typically side effects, undesirable changes in other body parts such as indigestion or blurry vision or dizziness or headaches.

In whole systems care, the changes that you should expect are both general or global and local. Globally, your overall energy and sense of well-being should improve. In general, your dynamics as a system, your resilience or ability to bounce back from symptom flares, minor stressors, and major life events, should improve. With more resilience, the duration of symptom flares should become shorter and less severe in intensity. What shifts is the tendency to express the symptoms, rather than the momentary expression itself.

Pattern of Local Systems

The patterning of the local symptoms that concerned you originally should become less frequent and/or less severe and perhaps even stop happening over time. Additional local symptoms that you had then, but had forgotten to mention in your initial evaluation, may also be lessened or gone.

Furthermore, you may have observed temporary re-emergence of old symptoms that you had forgotten for a while, old behaviors or old physical symptoms. Perhaps you came in for asthma, but then in the course of treatment you notice fewer and less severe asthma attacks but a return of diarrhea that you had many years before. Eventually the diarrhea will fade out, perhaps replaced for a while with a skin rash or an increased tendency to catch colds (a less severe form of disease than your chronic illness flares), which will itself gradually end with the passage of more time.

Course of Healing

In short, the course of healing reveals the wisdom of the body as an intact indivisible system in shifting the manifestations of disease back in time, as though rewinding a stored memory in a tape program and in moving the manifestations from upper body to lower body and from more essential organs (heart, lung, kidneys) to less important organs (skin, mucous membranes). You, as a system, change how you live in your world.

In summary, you are an indivisible living network system that is currently manifesting a chronic disease. The most effective treatment for you is a system-oriented package of options that speak to your highest levels of organization as a system.

Alternative Medicine: Take Stock of Your Illness and Your Healing Dynamics

Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Just as you are a unique individual in the universe, what you will need to heal is most likely unique to you. It will be some package of treatments, events, and people at a certain time and over time that will be the answer for you. And for that package to help you undergo the most lasting and complete healing, you will most likely need to make changes in how you live your life. Not superficial changes, not new diets or exercise programs. Real changes in your being.

To do so, you will have to leave your comfort zone of the familiar and the comfortable ways of being in some profound way. Outer changes might occur in your relationships, your job, your lifestyle, your habits, your living and working environment. But the inner changes will underlie the outer ones, and the inner movement will shift you in how you are in your world.

Changing the Context

You are expressing disease because you, as a dynamical system, are dysfunctional within the larger system/environment in which you live. Given your personal social, physical, and/or chemical environmental context, you are not being the best you that you can be.

If you can change the context – move to a new city or change jobs or get a divorce from a bad marriage, you might recover. But, if you can change yourself, you will recover. Sometimes the context will change as a part of the inner changes, sometimes not. What changes is how to relate to the world around you.

Maybe, though not many people can. More likely, some personalized package of care will help you make the changes and support you through them until they become an integral part of you.

To be sure, spontaneous healing does occur, as does healing from treatment with an isolated intervention, be it conventional or alternative. Miracles do occur, and some people get to stay the same and nonetheless give up their disease.

At the same time, in my practice I used to watch in amazement and sadness when dozens of patients with a chronic disease would flock to a particular treatment after word spread through their support network that one of their own had experienced a remarkable recovery from the “same” health problem during the treatment.

I never saw the others respond as miraculously or as well to the same treatment as did the one person for whom it appeared to make such a difference. It was as though that one person was poised and ready to respond, that the treatment somehow spoke to his or her condition in some unique, well-matched way.

The other patients were apparently not poised to respond to that treatment, and its language was unfortunately foreign to their conditions. I believe that the person with the miracle recovery did need the treatment they received at the time to experience their excellent outcome. It wasn’t a meaningless coincidence, but it may have been a meaningful synchronicity. The inner and outer circumstances were all set just right when the treatment arrived into his or her life. And the treatment arrived, because of the readiness of the person and the environmental context.

The point is that health care providers, healers, and treatments are external to you. Most of us need them to heal. However, they are a necessary but not sufficient element of the healing process. True healing must come from within, assisted and/or nurtured by the external help. At just the right moment.

Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Setting Your Healing Intention

Complementary and Alternative Medicine

The dictionary defines intention in general as “a course of action that one intends to follow,” “an aim or objective.” Ironically, in conventional medicine, the word intention means “the process by which a wound heals.” In a much broader sense, for healing from chronic disease, setting the intention to heal is the overarching first step in creating your program and putting the healing process into motion.

In setting this type of intention, you are asking the universe, cosmic consciousness, or God – however you are most comfortable addressing the “highest” level of infinite reality – to help you achieve the goal of healing.

Setting Your Intention to Heal is the Core Step

A recent survey of CAM use in the U.S. found that prayer for health was the most widely-used form of “CAM” in the previous year (43% prayed for their own health; 24% received prayers by others for their own health). You can consider this step to be praying or you can consider it setting your intention. This is a matter of labels with which you feel most comfortable. Whatever the label, setting your intention to heal is the core step of the overall plan.

It is up to the universe to figure out the details. You identify the goal, that is, healing. You may have some ideas about how you will start to go about operationalizing the steps along the way, and you will need to take those steps. When the intention is clear, the process will take over and lead you into whatever experiences, treatments, and people will ultimately be involved in your healing.

Make no assumptions that what or whoever is right for you now will remain right for you throughout the process. Remember, you are a dynamical being, ever-changing, expressing your free will in the context of a larger, a much larger environment.

No One Right Way to Set an Intention

There is no one right way to set an intention. It may be more common to do so in a quiet contemplative moment when you are fully present, without distractions of daily life. You may be alone or with someone you care about and who cares for you. For you, it may require a silent resolution, a statement out loud to yourself, a written diary entry, or a statement to a loved one.

What is important is to aim as globally as you can in setting the intention, i.e., that you are healing as a whole (not that just your body part is healing). As Larry Dossey, MD has said of prayer – Be Careful What You Pray For, You Just Might Get It. In this case, your goal is systemic healing, not just conventional medical local healing.

Play Big, Not Small

In other words, play big, not small. If you ask for small changes in body parts, you just might get those. If you ask for whole person healing as part of the Universe’s big picture, you just might get a transformation.

Setting an intention reflects clarity, simplicity, focus, largeness, love, determination, and positiveness. Bring together your feelings and your resolve in the moment of commitment to the intention.

Your intention is speaking to your deepest subconscious and unconscious mind and the larger non-local universal consciousness. Phrase the intention in a positive manner – that is, ”I am healing, I am whole at the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels of my being, for the highest and best good of all” (rather than saying, “I don’t have disease XYZ any more”). Aim for the most transcendent level with your intention.

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