Alternative Health

Certain alternative or complementary therapies are gaining credence among doctors as well as patients. But how much do you know about acupuncture and aromatherapy…etc

Acupuncture And Other Techniques
Practitioners believe a type of body energy flows along channels called meridians. Therapists therefore work on certain points of the body to increase,release or calm the flow. They use needles (acupuncture); fingers (acupressure); electric current (electro-acupuncture); a laser beam or magnet; colored light (color acupuncture) or a burning herb (moxibustion). Auriculo-therapy means that only the ear is worked on. Acu technique may help conditions such as back pain, nausea, fibromyalgia and migraine.

Alexander Technique
This uses various exercises, manoeuvrings and practical tips to re-educate movement and posture.

The aim is to avoid unnecessary muscle tension, which saps energy and encourages illnesses, such as depression, anxiety, headaches, backache, indigestion and high blood pressure.

Aromatherapy
This uses aromatic plant oils, such as lavender, ylang-ylang, geranium, neroli and rose. It can lift spirits, encourage relaxation, boost energy and head illness. Apply essential oil (diluted if necessary) to the skin, add it to bath water or inhale its vapor. Particularly good for stress.

Art Therapy
Using shapes, colors, lightness, and darkness when creating pictures or sculptures, for example, can symbolize the way you are feeling, and release emotions in a non damaging way. Helps heal depression, stress and addictive behaviors, such as eating disorders, drinking too much or being a workaholic.

Anger Management And Assertion Training
Special group workshops or one to one therapy training can help people understand their anger and use it positively, in ways that don’t damage themselves or others.

People can learn skills to help them be assertive rather than passive and/or aggressive. Boosts well being by relieving mental strain.

Bates Method
Involves exercises and advice to relieve eye strain and improve sight. Exercises used in this program include frequently looking up from close work to focus on something far away; screwing up your eyes or blinking; covering the eyes with the palms of the hands and splashing the eyes with warm and cold water.

Biofeedback Training
Electrical devices that register muscle tension, sweating or brainwaves help you recognize signs or stress. You can then focus on using relaxation exercise whenever necessary. With practice, this counteracts stress related illnesses such as heart disease, high blood pressure and migraine.

Biorhythms
These are rhythmical variations in the body’s energy, appetite, sexuality and fertility, mainly due to regular exposure to light and darkness, which influences the production of hormones and neurotransmitters (nerve message carries). Going out in bright daylight for at least half an hour each day and getting enough sleep in a darkened room at night can normalize biorhythms. This helps combat winter fatigue and depression, sleep and fertility problems, shift work disruption, jet lag and Alzheimer’s disease.

Stealth Health?

Anytime government gets involved where it shouldn’t be involved, things usually tend to get screwed up. Indeed, anytime government gets involved in matters where it should constitutionally be involved, there’s the potential for a mess. Think United States Postal Service.

Likewise, when governmental figures campaign and campaign hard for some scheme or other and then backtrack big time on major features of that scheme, cynic that I am, I smell a rat. Think Obamacare.

In recent days, Obama surrogates seem to have backed off on two previously-essential elements of the Obama health care plan: end of life consults, aka “death panels,” and now seem to have dumped the whole idea of “single payer,” aka government-run health care.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebellius dropped that latter bombshell in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Nation,” saying, according to Bloomberg.com, that “government-run insurance isn’t essential to the Obama administration’s proposed overhaul of U.S.

health care.” *

I suspect something is awry when the Obamaites seem set to abandon that single payer, “public option,” which Obama has advocated for years while denying he has so advocated. It was the most fundamental change in his push for reform and to scrap it at this point is beyond mysterious.

Granted, other factors are in play, including vociferous opposition expressed at town hall meetings which may have inspired even Democrats to re-think socialized health care. Another factor is obviously that Obama doesn’t want to appear an abject failure in his paramount domestic initiative, change and reform in America’s health care system.

Any health bill that comes across his desk would be preferable to no health bill and he would claim success and victory no matter how different it was from what he really wanted.

Obama would live to fight, reform, and change another day and preserve both his aura and his halo at least in the eyes of his worshippers.

A whole new idea of health care cooperatives, “networks of health-insurance plans owned by their customers,” is being discussed in the Democratic-controlled Senate Finance Committee.

The chief wrench in the works there is that the coops would “get started with government funds.”

Anywhere government puts our money it also sticks its nose, and its regulations, and its restrictions, and its bureaucrats. We will just have to see how cooperatives pan out, keep our powder dry, and be ready to make our voices heard again should they be yet another Obama subterfuge.