We treat a lot of teenagers at the YinOva Center and it makes me so happy that they feel comfortable coming in to see us and are able to use Chinese medicine as a way of taking care of themselves. As a mother I know, first hand, that teenage girls can be sensitive and vulnerable and that their busy schedules and complex social lives can weigh heavily upon their shoulders, making them feel depleted and imbalanced.  Our YinOva teenagers seek our help for a wide range of problems from anxiety to eating disorders and sports injuries to acne.

I remember only too well how self-conscious I was as a teenager and so it’s easy to understand why acne causes such misery. Fortunately help is at hand and we get very good results treating acne with Chinese herbs and acupuncture.

In Chinese medicine acne and other inflammatory skin conditions are seen as being caused by a combination of too much heat and dampness. People are said to need heat or yang for movement and to make transformations in the body but too much heat can lead to a variety of problems including acne.

So how do people get too hot? The cause can be internal or external.

An internal cause can be emotional pressure leading to constraint which in turn can lead to heat (a bit like a pressure cooker that gets tighter and tighter until steam comes out of the top). Teenagers are particularly prone to bottling up their emotions and becoming tight and stressed. Another internal cause can be an excess of some hormones which can be yang and therefore lead to expressions of heat. Another cause, unique to Chinese medicine, is a diagnosis of blood deficiency. This correlates to substandard nutrition in conventional medicine.  Many of the teenagers we see are not eating enough or are eating the wrong foods making them blood deficient. In Chinese medicine the blood is said to transport normal body waste and if it is deficient and thus not able to it’s job, swellings can appear on the skin.

External causes of heat include irritating chemicals on the skin, eating overstimulating foods and too much physical exertion.

So how do people get too damp? Again the cause can be internal or external.

Everybody needs moisture or yin in order to function. Dampness in Chinese medicine is a condition where the body does not metabolize fluids well leading to excessive fluids in the body’s tissues. Microorganisms such as bacteria thrive in these damp conditions leading to pustules and cystic acne. An internal cause would be a weak digestive system that is stressed by irregular eating habits and an external cause of damp may be fatty or greasy foods.

At the YinOva Center we help our patients with acne by using acupuncture to clear inflammation and using Chinese herbs to treat the dampness and heat. Job’s Tears Seeds (Yi Yi Ren), Poria Mushroom (Fu Ling) and Phellodendrin Bark (Huang Bai) clear dampness and Tree Peony Root Bark (Mu Dan Pi), Red Peony Root (Chi Shao), Goldenthread Root (Huang Lian) clear heat. Some of these herbs such as Phellodendrin Bark and Goldenthread root are also known for their anti-bacterial properties. Our acupuncturists combine these herbs with a formula to treat each patient’s specific underlying condition in order to treat their skin.

Results usually take 3 – 6 weeks and are quicker if the patient also makes dietary adjustments.

Carpel Tunnel Syndrome refers to a collection of symptoms such as wrist pain, numb and tingling fingers and weak hands.  It happens when the median nerve gets compressed because of inflammation leading to constriction in the narrow passageway between the bones and ligaments on the underside of the wrist. In my experience Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is often misdiagnosed. Not all wrist pain and finger numbness is caused by compression of the carpal tunnel some similar symptoms can be the result of muscle spasms in the forearm or nerve compression in the neck. If you are suffering from pain and numbness in your hands and want to work out if it is due to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome try pressing your hands together as if you are praying. If this makes your symptoms worse then you may well be suffering from inflammation of the carpal tunnel.

At the YinOva Center we treat a lot of CTS. Mostly we see women who are using a keyboard all day and are suffering from inflammation due to repetitive movements but we also treat CTS in women who are pregnant and for whom water retention is causing the carpal tunnel to be constricted. Other underlying causes of CTS include diabetes, arthritis, hypothyroidism and obesity.

Whatever the cause, acupuncture is a gentle and effective way of getting relief. In fact this study from the Clinical Journal of Pain showed that acupuncture was as effective as corticosteroids in relieving the symptoms of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. The acupuncture works by interrupting pain signals along the median nerve, reducing inflammation and promoting your body’s own natural pain killing chemicals to be released. We usually find that patients need 3 – 6 treatments to be pain-free. You can read more about how acupuncture works here.

Here is the advice we give our YinOva patients about how to address CTS :-

• Come on in and see us for 3 – 6 acupuncture treatments to help reduce pain and inflammation.

• Make sure you’re getting enough B vitamins. A study showed that people with lower levels of vitamin B6 showed more symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. I always think it’s best to get your vitamins from natural sources if you can. Good sources of B6 include poultry, salmon, sweet potatoes, bananas, avocados, chick peas and whole grains. Another study looked a B12 deficiency and CTS and concluded that increasing your intake of B12 can be helpful. You can increase your B12 by eating more fish, beef, lamb, cheese and eggs. Vegans are often deficient in this vitamin and I usually encourage them to supplement.

• Massage and Yoga can both help top relieve the local spasms and thus help with pain.

• Bromelain which is an enzyme found in pineapple and known for it’s anti-inflammatory effects can also be helpful.

• Arnica is a homeopathic remedy that comes both in pill form and as a lotion. Some of our YinOva patients have found that it really helps relieve the pain of CTS

When I worked as a hospice acupuncturist I had the great privilege of being with people as they died. It was tremendously rewarding to be able to be of service to patients and their families at such an important point in their journey.  I was at the beginning of my career in those days and learned so much about acupuncture and its potential for both pain relief and its ability to affect mood and relieve anxiety.

Anyone who has worked with people who are dying will tell you that there are many mysteries. My patients would often talk about seeing a bright light and of feeling as if they were leaving their bodies. As an energy worker I noticed that if I held my hand above a patient’s head at the point known as Du 20 I could feel energy hitting my hand. At the time I had no explanation for this and certainly felt as if I had more questions than answers about life and death.

So I was particularly interested to read this research study in the October issue of The Journal of Palliative Medicine where doctors at George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates recorded the brain activity of seven people dying from critical illnesses. The researchers found identical surges in brain activity moments before death, giving us what may be physiological evidence of  the kind “out of body” experiences my hospice patients used to describe. Moments before death, the patients experienced a burst in brain wave activity, with the spikes occurring at the same time before death and at comparable intensity and duration, leading the researchers to conclude that the patients were having a common experience.

In ancient Chinese medical texts there are references to energy leaving the body through the top of the head at the time of death. The theory being that qi or energy cannot die but simply transmutes into another form.  Alternatively the doctors involved in this study theorize that as blood pressure declines the brain’s neurons lose oxygen and so discharge, resulting in measurable electrical activity.

This study may well explain the energy I used to feel in my dying patients but it does not really resolve the mystery surrounding death. Those who believe we go on will find, in the idea of a brain wave surge, evidence of the soul leaving the body. Conversely those who think that there is no life after death will interpret the study as evidence that spiritual experiences at the end of life are a purely physical phenomenon. As the researchers say “Near death experiences have been documented by a large number of people. Interestingly, these descriptions tend to have a similar theme in that the recollection is vivid and detailed. The nature of these experiences often invokes a spiritual or divine explanation, a topic well beyond the scope of this report. Nonetheless, the end of life is a poorly studied area of clinical medicine and deserves more attention. Whether this observation is meaningful will be determined by future investigation.’

This week I was interested to read a new study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology which showed that ear acupuncture can significantly reduce low back and pelvic pain in pregnant women. You can read the full text of the study here. This is not the first research study to look at this. In fact in 2005 I was interviewed by ABC news about a previous study in the British Medical Journal that also showed acupuncture can help with pregnancy back pain. You can watch that clip here.

Up to 1 in 5 women suffer from back and pelvic girdle pain in pregnancy. Usually our patients complain of pain in the low back and buttocks although some patients also feel discomfort at the front of their pelvic area. Some women also experience radiating pain down one or both of their legs. Most women tell us that the pain gets worse if they have to stand for a long time. In 7% of women the pain continues after they have given birth becoming a chronic lower back issue.

At the YinOva Center many of our pregnant patients are keen to avoid medication, if possible, and so they choose acupuncture as a gentle and safe way to treat their pain. We usually use a combination of ear acupuncture as described in this recent study and local acupuncture as outlined in the previous study. The local acupuncture works in three ways – the needles act on the nervous system to interrupt the pain signal, the combination of needles causes the body to release chemicals which act as natural pain killers and by needling the spasms we get the knots in the muscles to release.

In the recent study the patients only received ear acupuncture which has a long history of efficacy in China and has been found in clinical research to initiate an endorphin release. 152 women, in late pregnancy, were divided into three groups one of which had small acupuncture needles held in place by tape and retained in three ear acupoints for one week. Another group received sham acupuncture and the final group acted as a control and received no acupuncture at all although they were instructed to rest and take painkillers if necessary.  81% of women in the ear acupuncture group reported a significant reduction in pain as oppose to 59% of the women in the sham acupuncture group and 47% of the women in the control group.

Acupuncture is a time-tested therapy for pain relief and because it has few side effects is one of the safest ways of releiving pain in pregnant women. Most of our patients get relief from the combination of ear and body acupuncture and usually feel much better after 2 or 3 treatments. Other helpful treatments include gentle stretching exercises as well as massage by a qualified prenatal massage therapist and we usually suggest that women do one of these in conjunction with their acupuncture treatment.

People feel so relaxed and pain-free after acupuncture that they regularly ask me “What’s in those needles?”. The answer is NOTHING.

Acupuncture needles couldn’t be more different from the needles used to give you a shot. They are so thin you could tie them in a knot if you needed to. So why do you feel so good after a treatment? The medicine, rather than being in the needle, is in you.  Studies have proved that the needles cause your body to release natural opiates, hence the feeling of well being you feel after we treat you.

When you come to see us and we place a needle in an acupoint, it makes the nervous system release chemicals into the muscles, spinal cord, and brain. These chemicals either change your experience of pain, or they trigger a cascade of chemicals and hormones which influence the body’s own internal regulating system. The improved energy flow and biochemical balance produced by acupuncture stimulates your body’s natural healing abilities, and enhances physical and emotional well-being.

So what is the acupuncturist’s role in all this? The needle is the place where my energy as a healer intersects with your energy as the patient. Those of you who know me know that I do qi gong over the needles during a treatment. That is where the magic happens and how I use my energy to effect yours.

However, there is a great deal we don’t yet know about acupuncture and why it works. As an example it’s worth looking at a study from UC Irvine. Traditionally acupuncturists have used a point on the little toe to address eye pain. The point is chosen because it is on the same meridian as the eye. Now scientists at UC Irvine have used an MRI to look at people’s brains whilst they are receiving acupuncture. What they found was that when the point for eye pain on the foot is stimulated the part of the brain that governs vision is activated. You can read more about this here.

It’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it but at the YinOva Center we have hundreds of happy patients who can tell you how great acupuncture feels. You can read their comments on Citysearch, NYMag.com, Urban Baby or W Magazine online.

Recently I blogged about how we at The YinOva Center help couples going through IVF. Some of you emailed or called and asked if we would offer a discount for people who are scheduling an assisted reproductive technique and need to book a series of appointments. We hadn’t thought of this and are grateful for the suggestion. The answer is YES! We are happy to support you in this way. So if you are doing an IVF cycle or IVF with donor egg here are our suggested treatment schedules which you can purchase ahead of time as a package.

Although you will buy your treatments ahead of time you don’t have to schedule all your appointments up front because timing will vary according to your cycle. Also we want to reassure you that should your procedure be canceled we will be happy to give you a refund for the treatments that are outstanding.

We are happy to offer you a discount on the following packages of treatments with YinOva Acupuncturists Margaret Sikowitz, Liz Carlson and Marie Amato. Because timing your treatments is important you may see any or all of our practitioners depending on who is available at the time that fits your ART schedule. To schedule some or all your appointments with Jill Blakeway please talk to our manager Mark Radoncic who will be delighted to help you.

The YinOva IVF Support Package

1 Initial intake prior to start of IVF
1 Acupuncture treatment during menstrual phase, if applicable
2 Acupuncture treatments during stimulation phase
2 Treatments (1 prior to retrieval and 1 prior to transfer; these should be scheduled about 24-48 before retrieval and transfer)
1 Treatment after transfer (24-48 hours after transfer, not the same day)
1 Treatment during luteal phase (usually around cycle day 20-28)

Package Value – $955 YinOva Discounted Price – $850

The YinOva Donor Egg IVF Support Package

1 Initial intake prior to start of IVF
1 Acupuncture treatment during menstrual phase, if applicable
1 Acupuncture treatment to enhance uterine lining (more if necessary)
1 Treatment after transfer
1 Luteal phase treatment

Package Value – $610 YinOva Discounted price – $550

All of these treatment packages are also offered to current patients without the initial consult fee.

ART Packages for Current Patients without the Initial Consult Fee

IVF Package – Package Value – $805 YinOva Discounted price – $725

Donor Egg Package – Package Value – $460 YinOva Discounted price – $415

So thank you YinOva patients for a great suggestion. It is our pleasure to offer you these discounts and as always we appreciate your faith in us. We are happy to support you through your IVF cycle.