New Article Published in ACUPUNCTURE TODAY January 9 2014

January 10th, 2014

Create A Protective Energy Field Using Medical Qi Gong

By Lisa VanOstrand, DMQ

Many people ask what they can do to protect themselves from outside influences. This is one of my favorite protective meditations from my medical qi gong teacher, Dr. Jerry Alan Johnson.

In modern energy healing modalities, it would not be considered unusual to hear of energy fields or auras. Even in Traditional Chinese Medicine the wei qi field is known to have a boundary that extends past the skin and its purpose is to offer protection. Pathogenic factors can enter in when our wei qi is weak. In addition to the wei qi field associated with the physical body, Dr. Jerry Alan Johnson defines a second and third wei qi or energy field associated with the mental/emotional and spiritual. With the spiritual energy field begin the furthest energy field out, next is the mental/emotional, and the physical energy field being the closest to the body.

This meditation is great to do before beginning your day of healing work. There are also certain places that one can use additional protection like entering a hospital, subway or airport.

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The Intriguing Health Benefits of Qigong

October 18th, 2013

The Claim: Qigong, a Chinese health practice based on gentle movements, meditation and breathing, has wide-ranging benefits, including improving balance, lowering blood pressure and even easing depression.

The Verdict: Increasingly popular in the U.S., qigong (pronounced chee-gong) has been found in recent studies to improve quality of life in cancer patients and fight depression. Other studies have found improvements in balance and blood pressure. But so far, there aren’t enough large, well-designed studies to constitute solid proof of any benefits, scientists say.

Qigong, with its roots in traditional Chinese medicine, is a close cousin to the better-known tai chi. Unlike that practice, qigong isn’t based in martial arts. Instead, it uses a variety of gentle movements, says Stanwood Chang, who teaches qigong classes at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Because its motions are simple and repetitive, qigong is more accessible to many people than tai chi, which has long sequences that need to be memorized, Mr. Chang adds.

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Why Are Hundreds of Harvard Students Studying Ancient Chinese Philosophy?

October 16th, 2013

Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together.

It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall, 48-year-old bespectacled professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, is describing to more than 700 rapt undergraduates is China, 2,500 years ago.

Puett’s course Classical Chinese Ethical and Political Theory has become the third most popular course at the university. The only classes with higher enrollment are Intro to Economics and Intro to Computer Science. The second time Puett offered it, in 2007, so many students crowded into the assigned room that they were sitting on the stairs and stage and spilling out into the hallway. Harvard moved the class to Sanders Theater, the biggest venue on campus.

Why are so many undergraduates spending a semester poring over abstruse Chinese philosophy by scholars who lived thousands of years ago? Read the rest of this entry »

Ian Gawler Blog: Telomeres, Meditation and Length of Life.

June 9th, 2012

If meditation can lengthen your telomeres, does this mean it lengthens your life? A major new study from America, involving Australian Noble Laureate Prof Elizabeth Blackburn, is one of a number of recent studies that tantalisingly suggests this may well be so.

What then are telomeres? Telomeres are sequences of DNA at the end of all our chromosomes that tend to become damaged and shorten each time one of our cells divide. With time and aging, the telomere length eventually drops below a critical length and then that cell can no longer divide properly and its death follows.

Telomerase is an enzyme that can rebuild and lengthen telomeres. Other research indicates that telomerase activity may be linked with psychological stress and physical health.

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Violence ages children’s DNA, shortens their chromosomes

June 9th, 2012

By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
Updated 4/23/2012 10:54 PM
Conventional wisdom says that hardship can make us old before our time In fact, a new study suggests that violence leaves long-term scars on children’s bodies — not just in bruises on the skin, but also altering their DNA, causing changes that are equivalent to seven to 10 years of premature aging.

Scientists measured this cellular aging by studying the ends of children’s chromosomes, called telomeres, according to Idan Shalev, lead author of a study in today’s Molecular Psychiatry. Telomeres are special DNA sequences that act like the plastic tips on shoelaces, which prevent the DNA in chromosomes from unraveling. They get shorter each time a cell divides, until a cell can’t divide anymore and it dies.

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Physicians May Heal Themselves Differently

April 15th, 2011

This article highlights quality of life versus quantity of life.  I believe quality of life is always the most important factor.  If you agree, this maybe something that you want to make sure your physicians understand when discussing any procedures with them as they are surely taking it into consideration for themselves.

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New Focus on Dangers of CT Scans

December 17th, 2009

From CBS News, December  14 2009

Dose of Radiation Varies Greatly from One Hospital to Another; Skyrocketing Scans Could Lead to 29,000 New Cancer Cases

(CBS) There were about 70 million CT scans performed in United States in 2007 – up from just 3 million in 1980. The scans, also known as CAT scans can help doctors identify tumors and internal injuries among many other uses.

But they rely on dangerous radiation to get the job done and the harms may be greater than previously thought, reports CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook.

After Alabama school teacher Becky Coudert had a brain CT scan in September her hair started to fall out and, according to a lawyer, “She developed a broad band of baldness from one temple to the other, from around the back of the head.”

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Making Health Care Better

November 18th, 2009

This article is by David Leonhart and was published in the New York Times Magazine November 3, 2009 issue.  It contains alot of great information about the current state of the health care system and ideas that could make hospitals and doctors perform with fewer mistakes.  The bold formatting is mine.

During one of our first conversations, Brent James told me a story that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to hear from a doctor. For most of human history, James explained, doctors have done more harm than good. Their treatments consisted of inducing vomiting or diarrhea and, most common of all, bleeding their patients. James, who is the chief quality officer at Intermountain Healthcare, a network of hospitals and clinics in Utah and Idaho that President Obama and others have described as a model for health reform, then rattled off a list of history books that told the fuller story. Sure enough, these books recount that from the time of Hippocrates into the 19th century, medicine made scant progress. “The amount of death and disease would be less,” Jacob Bigelow, a prominent doctor, said in 1835, “if all disease were left to itself.”

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Cancers Can Vanish Without Treatment, but How?

October 28th, 2009

A great article from October 26th New York Times by Gina Kolata.

Call it the arrow of cancer. Like the arrow of time, it was supposed to point in one direction. Cancers grew and worsened. But as a paper in The Journal of the American Medical Association noted last week, data from more than two decades of screening for breast and prostate cancer call that view into question. Besides finding tumors that would be lethal if left untreated, screening appears to be finding many small tumors that would not be a problem if they were left alone, undiscovered by screening. They were destined to stop growing on their own or shrink, or even, at least in the case of some breast cancers, disappear.

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WARNING: WHAT EVERY CANCER PATIENT SHOULD KNOW…Before Starting on CHEMOTHERAPY

October 7th, 2009

This article appeared in NEW LIFE  MAY-JUNE 2008 Issue and is by By Robert H. Sorge, N.D., Ph.D.  I wanted to include this on my blog as I often think chemotherapy is not the best option for clients with strong immune system and cancer that has not metastasized.  What is required is a complete life style change.  As Jeffrey Yuen, has repeatedly said “the consciousness that created the illness, is not the consciousness that can cure it”.  The people that I have known that have cured cancer have completely devoted their life to curing it, 24-7.  Regardless of the clients choice on chemotherapy, I support all clients in making the decisions that they and their family feel most comfortable with.

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