Month: May 2018

Interesting Facts About Renaissance Doctors And Medicine

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Do you usually link Renaissance to advances in medicine? Typically, when we talk about the Renaissance period, we talk about an explosion of learning and creativity. From paintings to music, this was a tremendous time for the arts in particular. However, the era of the Renaissance, which lasted from the middle 1400s until the 1700s, also featured major developments in European medicine. Here are some of the important facts surrounding the Renaissance period and medicine:

1. New knowledge and inventions improved medicine

A flurry of new knowledge and inventions helped to advance medicine quickly, during the Renaissance. There were no instruments yet to observe bacteria, and thus create a need for cheap urbane scrubs. However, diagrams of the human body and the printing press both had a huge influence on the world of medicine. Thus, doctors had a better comprehension of how the human body functioned, than during any previous era in Europe’s history.

2. Galen was no longer king

During the previous Middle Ages, the medical world considered Galen’s writings to be infallible. Galen was an ancient Greek living in Rome, who had developed the concepts of Hippocrates, “The Father of Medicine.”

However, during the Renaissance, doctors took a more practical and academic approach to training in their profession. Medical students studied from books with realistic diagrams of humans. In addition to better books, doctors-in-training also had access to more of them, thanks to the invention of the printing press. In fact, universities even permitted students to dissect humans, towards the end of the Renaissance. This practice had previously been limited to animals.

3. Science began to supersede spirituality

During the Renaissance, people still held to some spiritual reasoning regarding diseases. For instance, people were unaware that bacteria existed, and could spread from person-to-person. However, logic became king, due to a new wealth of knowledge available, and an efficient way to distribute it faster-the printing press. In addition, the training for surgical procedures greatly improved. Apprentices would learn surgical techniques, from an active surgeon. Interestingly, universities themselves failed to supply doctors-in-training with these skills. Nevertheless, the improvements in textbooks about human anatomy significantly boosted the complexity of the surgeries that doctors did.

4. Many did not embrace advances in medicine

While the Renaissance ushered in a new era of medical knowledge and skills, not everyone was impressed. During the Renaissance, home remedies remained a vital aspect of medical treatment, for many people. In fact, some people still sought treatments from local shaman who lacked formal training in the medical profession. Also, many “old-school” doctors and the Catholic Church still adhered to the teachings of Galen. However, within time, medical advances during the Renaissance would revolutionize the whole professional.

The Renaissance was clearly an era of enlightenment and developments. Besides the fantastic output in the arts, the medical profession flourished as well. While doctors were yet unaware of bacteria or the need to wear scrubs during surgeries, they were nonetheless learning. Essentially starting with the Renaissance, spiritual doctors were becoming scientific doctors!

Ways You Can Use Ayruvedic Medicine For Arthritis Natural Treatment

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Ayruvedic medicine is an ancient system of natural medicine from India that has been practiced there for centuries. Dr. Deepak Chopra has helped bring this ancient healing art to the North America. Now you can have arthritis natural treatment using Ayruvedic medicine.

With regard to arthritis, most pains are caused by the aggravation of one of the three doshas, (vata) and a build up of toxins (ama).

Fasting is a great way to expel toxins and the fast should be accompanied by taking two teaspoons of lemon juice with a teaspoon of honey in a cup of warm water every day once in the morning and again in the evening.

Here are the 7 ways:

Reduce inflammation and pain (vata) with a body massage using sesame or mustard oil.
A light exercise routine is recommended. Listen to your body. If exercise causes you pain after one hour then stop even if youre only walking.
For skeletal pain, take orange juice, lime juice or vitamin C.
There is an Ayruvedic herb called guggul and this can be taken with warm water twice a day after meals.
Foods that can help:
Vegetable juices and soups, which are easily digested. Also carrot, cucumber and red beets juice. Green salad with lemon and salt. Cooked vegetables include zucchini, squash and pumpkin. Fruits include apples, oranges, grapes and papaya. Spices for cooking: cumin, coriander, fennel, turmeric, ginger and asafetida.
Foods to avoid:
Fried food, spicy food and foods that form wind like okra, spinach, potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli. Dont indulge in an excess of tea or coffee, alcohol, white sugar, yoghurt, chocolate and cocoa. Sweets generally should be avoided as should smoking.
Your Daily Routine:
Dont sleep during the day and dont stay up late. Avoid emotions such as excess fear, anxiety, worry, grief and stress.

You should consider the wisdom of Ayruveda if you have arthritis. These steps are simple to do and could ease your arthritis pain. Arthritis natural treatment using Ayruvedic medicine is very significant. Naturally, it is important to consult your doctor before doing this.

Holistic Medicine An Overview

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Practitioners of holistic medicine believe that treating illness and injury doesn’t stop with conventional methods. Instead, they practice the art of healing with the mindset that the whole individual should be included in any treatment. The mind, the body, and the spirit are all a part of the healing process. There is also considerable effort put toward preventing illness and disease through these practices. Practitioners often describe the optimal condition being one in which unlimited life force energy is allowed to flow freely throughout the body.

When one applies the practices of holistic medicine, they don’t stop at the superficial cause of the illness or the injury that brought them to need healing in the first place. In order to achieve a sense of well being as well as treat the specific ailment, they incorporate a variety of safe modalities in order to get to the root cause. This includes looking at the physical aspect of the treatment, their intake of nutrition, the environment in which they live, and then examining their spiritual lifestyle as well.

Many people are under the mistaken notion that holistic medicine is somehow at odds with conventional surgery and prescription drug treatments. This isn’t the case at all. The practice includes looking at alternatives to be sure, but conventional methods and factual science have always been a part of the lifestyle. One of the main differences between this form of practice and traditional methods is the focus on finding the root cause of an illness, rather than simply treating the symptoms, which is what much of modern science has become.

Adhering closely to the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, practitioners find it much more cost effective to look at preventative methods with at least as much ferocity as they look for ways in which to treat the already ill. When possible, the best methods involve using the patient’s own healing abilities and exploiting them so that they can prevent and fight most diseases on their own. When illness does occur, it is usually seen as a sign of a larger dysfunction.

In addition to promoting lifestyle changes from within, there is also an emphasis on improving relationships with others. This not only includes relationships with friends and family, but finding a better way to coexist within an environment, if not changing that environment altogether. Practitioners believe that a person’s surroundings have much to do with that individual’s continued wellness.

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Should You Use Alternative Medicine

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The popularity of alternative medicine is on the increase with each passing day. One may ask what exactly is alternative medicine. It has a different meaning to different individual. Any methods of health care and products that are not considered conventional medicine. For example you choose to use alternative medicine as a healing option instead of visiting a traditional doctor. Alternative medicine is usually used for treating allergies, skin cancer, colds and even cancer.

In alternative medicine you treat the patient as the whole person. It is considered less harmful for the body and more economical over a long period. In a lot of cases these alternative treatments have very positive results. The general public have nowadays increased information on alternative medicine made available to them. There are an increased number of doctors applying alternative medicine in their practices.

For those who oppose to alternative medicine they think it a waste of time. They argue that it has not been demonstrated as effective. Another objection of theirs is that because of the lack of scientific research alternative medicine is therefore harmful and unproven.

However, consumers and professionals worldwide are embracing alternative medicine with each passing day. There is a huge market for this treatment and is growing rapidly. At unconventional schools and naturopathic medical schools alternative medicine is taught as part of their curriculum.

In my opinion alternative medicine has never been a waste of money and time. Unless it costs you a lot of money and you are feeling worse. For minor health issues alternative medicine is not harmful. In some situations it is best to use alternative medicine to compliment other treatment methods.

Today alternative medicine is accepted as less invasive, less harmful, cheaper and better over long term than conventional medicine. There are more research data available to the general public. There is growing interest in alternative medicine by more and more medical and health professionals.

immunological Infertility Looked At From The Viewpoint Of Traditional Chinese Medicine

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It is easier to understand the concept of what has come to be called Immunologic Infertility, when we look at its causes as described in Western Medical Science.

A womans ability to successfully retain the fertilized ovum and allow it to grow, depends upon a complex interplay of sophisticated immunologic adjustments designed to convert her Uterus into a host for the developing embryo and protect the developing fetus and its placenta against rejection.
Sometimes these mechanisms can go wrong; depending upon how and when this happens, the woman might experience recurrent miscarriages, infertility, or failure to conceive even after IVF.

An underlying immunological factor needs to be considered in all those cases of “unexplained infertility”, especially when a “blighted ovum” is repeatedly seen.

Western Science has thrown up a lot of evidence to show that anti-sperm antibodies can occur in both men and women and can lead to infertility. Anti-sperm antibodies are protein molecules that get attached to sperms and interfere with the sperm’s activity in any of several ways. They may immobilize sperm, cause them to clump together, limit their ability to pass through the cervical mucus, or prevent them from binding to and penetrating the egg.

Researchers have classified specific antibodies by (1) type viz. IgA, IgG and IgM and (2) the site at which they get attached to the sperm (its head, midpiece, or tail). It is seen that IgG type antibodies are most common in men while IgA type ate found in women’s cervical mucus and follicular fluid.
Binding to the head of the sperm is believed to interfere with attachment and penetration of the egg, while binding to its tail interferes with motility.

Other immunological causes involve women who produce antibodies that indirectly cause clotting in blood vessels leading to the developing fetus. The fetus is deprived of nutrients and dies in utero, which triggers an abortion.
It is now thought that between 20 and 25 percent of all repeated miscarriages are due to immunological problems.

Although several male as well as female immunological factors have been identified as causing infertility, treatment of this condition is still in its nascent stage in conventional medicine, which tends to look at problems in isolation and then proceed to treat them in similar manner.

Specific immune conditions causing infertility are not as yet adequately defined or understood and conventional treatment in suspected cases of Immune disorders is presently limited to use of Aspirin and Heparin to prevent clotting in fetal blood vessels and IVIg for controlling an immune response, often along with Steroids.

Traditional Chinese medicine, with its holistic viewpoint, though it does not mention “immunologic disorders” of course, covers a host of underlying conditions that result in infertility, and addresses what it calls the ‘imbalance’ that causes ‘disharmony’.

In the course of several years of my practice as a TCM Infertility Specialist, I have successfully tackled hundreds of so-called cases of ‘unexplained infertility’ with my custom-made Chinese herbal formulas and I suspect many of these might well have been cases in which there was a then unknown ‘immunological factor’ at work, a factor that got corrected when the underlying imbalance was removed!

Immune factors do not always manifest as physical symptoms but sometimes the following symptoms may be noticed:

Frequent miscarriages in the very early weeks
Bodyaches, PMS
Irritability and depressive episodes and /or panic attacks
Night sweats with sweating over the breast bone
Insomnia in the early mornings
Hormone levels show a decrease in every mid-cycle
Past history of hives or itchy skin
Thyroid disorders with the presence of anti-thyroid antibodies

These symptoms often translate into liver qi stagnation, and yin deficiency with heat in the heart and liver in TCM. These symptoms are further complicated by irregular menstruation and a saw-toothed, erratic BBT graph.

Several studies are now emerging about the use of Chinese herbs in this type of infertility.
www.pubmed.gov (a service of the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health) quotes the following article about the Chinese herb Ziyin jianghuo:
“According to the microcosmic Syndrome Differentiation, immunological infertility is recognised as Kidney Yin Deficiency-Hyperactivity of Fire Syndrome. Zhibai Dihuang Pills, a recipe of Chinese medicinal herbs, was used to treat the infertile couples with antisperm and/or antizona pellucida antibodies in their blood serum. It was found that after the treatment, the antibodies were converted to negative in 81.3% of immunological infertile couples. All 8 cases of successful pregnancy occurred in 1-9 months after antibodies negative conversion and the negative status was maintained throughout the course of pregnancy.”

The Ministry of Health of Chinas published Materia medica now documents over ten thousand herbal substances, most of which have been found through years of usage and experimentation in specific conditions.

Chinese herbs are mostly used in combinations of 8 or more herbs (often upto 20 herbs) and are customized into formulas for individual patients. It is therefore usual to have different herbal formulas for patients in the same clinical setting. These herbs can be dispensed in various forms. Raw herbs are mostly used in infertility conditions and taken in the form of brewed teas.

A study of immunological male infertility by Chen Xiaoping used the traditional remedy Zhibai Dihuang Wan. A control group received cortisone and vitamin C. In the herbal treatment group, autoimmunity measures decreased, sperm became more viable, and 80 percent of wives became pregnant within six months. In the control group, 46 percent of wives became pregnant.

Each herb has distinct properties regarding its energy, flavor and movement in the body. It is related to different meridians of the body, too.

Four types of energies described in TCM are cold, cool, warm and hot and the five flavors or herbs are pungent, sweet, sour, salty and bitter.

Recent studies have demonstrated that traditional Chinese medicine could regulate the gonadotropin-releasing hormone to induce ovulation and improve the uterus blood flow and menstrual changes of endometrium. In addition, it also has impacts on patients with infertility resulting from polycystic ovarian syndrome, anxiety, stress and immunological disorders. Ref. Current Opinion in Obstetrics and Gynecology: June 2008 – Volume 20 – Issue 3 – p 211-215

Western medicine often makes use of the corticosteroid group of drugs, with all there attendant dangers and disadvantages, to treat immunologic infertility.
This alone, apart from several other reasons, should encourage the use of Traditional Chinese herbal medicine, to treat such Cases and I am sure that with increased awareness about this, more and more men and women facing infertility will opt for this line of treatment, in the not-too-distant future!

Patricia Karnowski, M.S.O.M
Fertility Herbalist