Hi, I’m Dr. Cynthia Clark, Acupuncture Physician, Applied Clinical Nutritionist, creator of energy evolution and President of Longevity Wellness. I want to talk to you today about Autoimmune Conditions.
In western medicine, autoimmune disease refers to about 80 different illnesses ranging from Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, fibromyalgia runs the gambit. Oriental medicine provides a unique diagnostic tool to the vantage point of autoimmune conditions. But before we get there, about 24 million people in the United States are affected by autoimmune conditions and most of those are women.
The cause of autoimmune diseases is considered to be unknown. Treatment is considered primarily to be nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories, like Aleve, Advil, Motrin, and immunosuppressants. Why would we want to seek a better treatment than nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories and immune suppressants? Primarily, because both of these can be hard on the body.
And when we’re talking about autoimmune conditions, we have a body that’s already in a deficient impaired state. So nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories have been shown to cause ulcers in the small intestine within seven days of taking them and healthy volunteers. And immune suppressants, well, they suppress the immune system. And right now, and always, the immune system is one of the most important parts of happy, healthy, functional living.
So research has shown that acupuncture can assist the body in self-regulation of the immune system. The results of a study on anxious women showed that the most favorable effects of acupuncture on immune functions took place 72 hours after the treatment, and they persist for a full month after each session.
The same studies show that impaired immune functions in anxious women. So, chemotaxis phagocytosis, lympho proliferation, and NK activity were significantly improved by acupuncture. And augmented limited parameters, like superoxide anion levels and lympho proliferation of the patient subgroup whose values had been too high or significantly diminished. So good gets gooder and bad gets less.
Acupuncture brought the above-mentioned parameters to values closer to that of healthy controls, exerting a modulatory effect on the immune system. Further, another thing that the study demonstrated is that acupuncture facilitates the migration of cells to the endothelial layer, which is the skin towards the side of infection.
Why is it so effective, and what does the lens of oriental medicine diagnostic view offer us that’s different or in addition to traditional Western treatment? So here, we’re talking about traditional Chinese medicine or oriental medicine treatment.
The first thing that we look at when we look at autoimmune conditions is weigh syndrome. This means that the immune energy is depleted. Immune energy actually comes from every organ in the body. Each one sends off its own signal, its own blood flow, its own communication with all of the different other organs in the body. And in addition to that, in addition to the weigh syndrome, we also have the functioning of each one of the organs.
So for example, the spleen, which is the unsung hero in western medicine turns out to be one of the most important organ systems in oriental medicine. And spleen qi deficiency, or spleen qi sinking, or spleen prolapsed, all of these are considered to be possible underlying causes differentiations that lead us to autoimmune conditions. These are the same kinds of differentiations that lead us to things like digestive disorders, which most autoimmune conditions also have.
Modern research has led to some major breakthroughs and neuroimmunology researchers at Rutgers University Medical School, published a study in which electro acupuncture at a major acupuncture point known as Stomach 36 controlled a sepsis related infection in mice. That’s a tremendous amount of benefit coming from one single acupuncture points.
So we’re really, really, really interested in that. This study led to the discovery of one of the most intricate neuro-immune circuits found to date, and that’s from a Scientific American study in 2014.
So, I’m Dr. Cynthia Clark with Longevity Wellness. If you have an autoimmune condition, we would love to talk further with you about it and see how we can help. Thank you. That’s good medicine.
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