At Uptown Acupuncture San Diego we’re ready to take your pain away through a time proven ancient system of medicine, treating the problem itself and not just the symptoms.

What’s wrong? Has that nagging elbow injury been bothering you? You know the one that you got playing Tennis with your best friend Bill 2 years ago. It’s the one that makes you have to wrap your elbow each time you still play tennis with him due to chronic pain and makes you wince when you have to reach down in that bottom desk drawer at work.

Ever heard of acupuncture or holistic medicine for sports?

I’m talking about acupuncture to treat your injury. No? Well maybe that’s the reason you still have pain.When most get injured in sports or otherwise, they often think the pain will go away by itself or with the help of an anti-inflammatory like aspirin or Motrin. I admit these certainly will help ease the pain and will take away the discomfort. However, they don’t treat the root of the problem. Acupuncture is the holistic source that will help take your pain away from that nagging old sports injury and make you function again.

How is this possible?

Well it’s a simple concept that goes back through thousands of years of Oriental medicine. Your body has energy lines. “Huh? What’s that you say?” Yes that’s right, lines of energy that affect your every movement. Acupuncture focuses on these points. When you injure yourself playing sports, your energy is disrupted and needs to flow naturally again. Otherwise the simple laws of physics come into effect, for every action has an equal and opposite reaction, or in laymen’s terms, action= you injured, reaction = OUCH!

“But they’re needles! That sounds like it’ll hurt!”

Well, actually, when the needles are applied, they’re applied to points on your body where you won’t feel a thing except for a prick an a dull achy sensation, often very minute compared to most sports injuries. “Yeah right, some needles stuck in me are gonna fix my tennis elbow that I received playing tennis with Bill by magic…Riiight.” No, not magic, energy lines. They go all the way from your head to your feet. “Ohh ok, that’s what I hear. Whenever an athlete gets injured they go to the magical acupuncturist and get healed by magical needles.”

Well, almost…they get healed, but it’s a thousands of years old system of holistic healing. The needles allow the body’s energy to be able to flow again and your body naturally heals. That’s what we do at Uptown Acupuncture. We take your pain away help you to heal.

What athletes use acupuncture you say?

Muggsy Bogues of the Charlotte Hornets used acupuncture to treat his knee pain. The pain was so bad that it nearly threatened his career in basketball. After being treated by a acupuncturist, he was back on the court in no time and pain free. Acupuncture ultimately saved his career. “Ok, but that’s just one athlete. He must have been a rare case.” No, actually he’s one of nearly hundreds of professional athletes and semi-professional athletes as well as college athletes that acupuncture has saved their career.

Other athletes such as Steffi Graf,

a Wimbledon champion used sports therapy acupuncture to get rid of pain in her left knee.An Olympic bobsledder, Brian Shimer, used sports therapy acupuncture to get rid of aches and pains he had in his back and legs. He was ready to bobsled again with literally “the best of them” after his treatment. If NBA players, Wimbledon champions and world ranked Olympic champions have found out the benefits of acupuncture, don’t you think you should give it a try?

Does this sound like you?

“But I’m no professional athlete. Gees, I’m just a guy that likes to play tennis on the weekend with Bill.” Yes, maybe, but do you want to continue to stay in pain and only allow your injury to get worse over time or do you want to heal and be pain free?

Visits to us might cost you as little as $10.

We offer free insurance screening and in this troubled economy, you should should have access to quality treatments at an affordable price.

Acupuncture works!!

That’s what I want you to understand. Time and time again holistic acupuncture has healed athletes of their injuries and allowed them to continue their profession pain free. Even if you’re not a professional athlete or a world class Olympian, why not get healed as well as one? The longer that you take to decide to fix that injury, the worse it will become. Come to San Diego Acupuncture and let us help you. We’ll apply treatment to you so that overtime, your injury and pain will be a distant memory and you’ll be yourself once again.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) –

It may come as a surprise to many patients, but a new study shows that primary care visits have actually gotten a little longer since the late 1990s.

This is particularly remarkable, say the researchers, given the increased pressure on primary care doctors to be efficient in the face of rising numbers of patients and declining income.

Nevertheless, based on quality measurements like whether physicians counseled patients on diet and exercise, they found that “overall performance…was poor.”

Any improvements in care quality will likely require multi-pronged efforts, the researchers say, including paying doctors for spending more time to counsel and screen patients.

Primary care physicians were making about 10 percent less in 2003 than they were in 1995, after taking inflation into account, Dr. Lena M. Chen, who is now with the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, and her colleagues note in their report in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“Given the reimbursement environment and the pressures to improve efficiency,” they add, “one might worry that primary care physicians would respond by spending less time with each patient to see more patients, improve their efficiency, and boost their incomes.”

To see if this was actually true, and to look at whether the quality of care these docs were providing over time got better or worse, Chen and her team analyzed data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey for 1997 through 2005. The survey, run by the National Center for Health Statistics, samples a nationally representative group of office-based physicians annually.

Over the study period, the number of adult visits to primary care physicians rose from 273 million to 338 million, a 10 percent increase on a per person basis. The average visit lasted 18 minutes in 1997, while visit time had increased to nearly 21 minutes by 2005.

While older patients and new patients had longer visits, non-Hispanic black patients and Hispanic patients had significantly shorter visits than whites, the researchers found. They say they were “surprised” by this finding, which “may explain why patients of minority groups do not always receive care that is comparable to that provided to white patients.”

During the study period, the quality of care doctors were providing showed “only modest improvements,” Chen and her colleagues say, with patients no more likely to get counseling on diet and exercise in 2005 than they were in 1997, even though there’s strong evidence that giving high-risk patients this advice is beneficial.

There were improvements in the likelihood of doctors prescribing medications with proven benefit for patients — for example beta blockers for coronary artery disease or appropriate medications for heart failure, the researchers found.

They conclude: “Improvements in quality of care will likely require a combination of investments in systems such as electronic health records, greater use of other professionals such as nurse practitioners, and better reimbursement to primary care physicians for the extra time spent.”

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, November 9, 2009

FYI : At Uptown Acupuncture San Diego, we spend1 1/2 hour on an initial evaluation and treatment, follow up visits are one hour long. We listen to our patients and tailor our services to their needs.

Asian Chicken Stir Fry

A quick fix for busy weeknights, this fragrant stir-fry of chicken, fresh ginger and bok choy is flavored with sesame oil, sherry, soy sauce and hoisin sauce and served over warm angel hair pasta.

Ingredients

• 1 (8 ounce) yam noodles
• 1 teaspoon coconut oil
• 1 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 skinless, boneless chicken breast half – cut into bite-size pieces
• 1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
• 2 leaves bok choy, diced
• 1/4 cup chicken broth
• 2 tablespoons dry sherry
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1-1/2 tablespoons hoisin sauce
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• 2 green onions, minced

Cooking Instructions

1. In a large pot with boiling salted water cook yam pasta until al dente. Drain.
2. Meanwhile, in a large nonstick skillet heat coconut and sesame oil over medium high heat. Saute onion and garlic until softened. Stir in chopped chicken, and cook until chicken browns and juices run clear. Stir in ginger, bok choy, chicken stock, sherry, soy sauce, and hoisin sauce. Reduce heat, and continue cooking for 10 minutes.
3. Toss pasta with chicken mixture until well coated. Season with salt. Serve warm sprinkled with minced green onions.

Nutrition Facts
Servings per Recipe: 2

Kirk likes to double or triple the recipe and have left overs..

Amount Per Serving

• calories: 498cal
• total fat: 9.2g
• cholesterol: 35mg
• sodium: 1263mg
• carbohydrates: 75.2g
• fiber: 5.5g
• protein: 28g

Acupuncture and Stress

• This is a special chapter which could need a whole lesson.

• Briefly: it’s impossible to have an emotion without a reflex response of muscles and the Autonomous nervous system.

• In the opposite direction, you can not act on muscles or the autonomous nervous system without having an emotional modification.

The cholinergic anti-inflammatory system:

• Reflex loop mediated by the vagus nerve.

• Inflammation releases cytokines; cytokines activate vagus nerve afferents, and the vagus nerve will respond by the

release of acetylcholine ,which will act on the nicotinic receptors of the inflammatory cells, inhibiting the release

of cytokines.

• The response can be global or local.

• Acupuncture has a cholinergic effect.

Activation of the cholinergic anti-inflammatory system.

Aspirin and ibuprofen found to substantially increases vagus nerve activity.

Acupuncture, meditation, hypnosis, and relaxation therapies can stimulate vagus nerve.

Exercise raises vagus nerve activity and decreases cytokine levels.

Fish oil, soy oil, olive oil increases vagus nerve activity through cholecystokinin. ^[2]

Kevin J. Tracey (b. 10 December 1957, Fort Wayne, IN, USA) is Director of The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research and Professor and President of the Elmezzi Graduate School of Molecular Medicine in Manhasset, NY. Although trained as a neurosurgeon, he is an immunologist known for his physiological and molecular studies of inflammation and disease and, in particular, for investigating how the nervous system controls the responses of the immune system to threat.

G. Baden / Zefa / Corbis

Parents who suspect that artificial ingredients in food are affecting their children’s behavior can now point to some cold, hard proof.

A carefully designed study released Thursday in The Lancet, a leading British medical journal, shows that a variety of common food dyes and the preservative sodium benzoate — an ingredient in many soft drinks, fruit juices, salad dressings and other foods — causes some children to become more hyperactive and distractible than usual.

“In terms of a question that’s been raging for years, it’s the best study to date — an extremely good study,” says Dr. Philip Shaw, a research psychiatrist in the Child Psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. 

The study prompted Britain’s Food Standards Agency to issue an immediate advisory to parents to limit their children’s intake of additives if they notice an effect on behavior. In the U.S., there’s been no such official response, but doctors say it makes sense for parents to be on the alert.

Meanwhile, the food industry is awaiting further research. “We take our responsibility to consumers seriously and will study the research finding in great detail,” says Cathy Cook, spokesperson for the International Association of Color Manufacturers.

The research, led by Jim Stevenson, a professor of psychology at England’s University of Southampton, involved about 300 children in two age groups: 3-year-olds and 8- and 9-year-olds. Over three one-week periods, the children were randomly assigned to consume one of three fruit drinks daily: one contained the amount of dye and sodium benzoate typically found in a British child’s diet, a second drink had a lower concentration of the additives, and a third was additive-free. All the children spent a week drinking each of the three mixtures, which looked and tasted alike. During each weeklong period, teachers and parents, who did not know which drink the kids were getting, used a variety of standardized behavior-evaluation tools — some observational and one computer-based — to size up such qualities as restlessness, lack of concentration, fidgeting, and talking or interrupting too much. 

Stevenson found that children in both age groups were significantly more hyperactive when drinking the stuff containing additives.

Three-year-olds had a bigger response than the older kids to the lower dose of additives — roughly the same amount of food coloring as in two 2-oz. bags of candy. And, there were big individual differences in sensitivity. While the effects were not nearly so great as to cause full-blown ADHD, Stevenson nonetheless warns that “these adverse effects could affect the child’s ability to benefit from the experience of school.”

He notes that a separate pilot study found that kids can become more hyperactive within one hour of consuming food additives.

The Lancet study is the first to nail down a link between artificial ingredients and hyperactivity, though the connection has long been suspected and was the basis for the Feingold Diet, which eliminates all artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners and preservatives and was popularized in the 1970s as a treatment for ADHD. Though such a diet alone is not a proven treatment for ADHD, some clinicians routinely advise parents of kids with ADHD to stick with a more natural diet.” I’m not maniacal about it, but I tell parents that your kid will do better if they are on a diet that is free of additives and junk food,” says psychiatrist Edward Hallowell, author a several books on ADHD. “I urge them to eat whole foods; they’ll be healthier anyway.”

Now that a link has been found, researchers will be looking to confirm the British study and build upon it. “My guess is that if we do similarly systematic work with other additives, we’d learn they, too, have implications for behavior,” says Dr. James Perrin, professor of pediatrics at Harvard. “My friends who study the food industry say we have about 70,000 new products a year, so children are facing tremendous numbers of new opportunities for things that may not be good for them.” The study, he says, is one more reason to cheer the movement toward organic and natural foods.

Can Sugar Substitutes Make You Fat?

By Alice Park Sunday, Feb. 10, 2008

When it comes to dieting, most of us are willing to resort to a trick or two to help us curb our appetite and eat less

— drinking water to fill up when we’re hungry, for example, or opting for artificial sweeteners instead of sugar to get the same satisfying sweetness without the offending calories.

But new research suggests that the body is not so easily fooled, and that sugar substitutes are no key to weight loss —

perhaps helping to explain why, despite a plethora of low-calorie food and drink, Americans are heavier than ever.

In a series of experiments, scientists at Purdue University compared weight gain and eating habits in rats whose diets were supplemented with sweetened food containing either zero-calorie saccharin or sugar. The report, published in Behavioral Neuroscience, presents some counterintuitive findings: Animals fed with artificially sweetened yogurt over a two-week period consumed more calories and gained more weight — mostly in the form of fat — than animals eating yogurt flavored with glucose, a natural, high-calorie sweetener. It’s a continuation of work the Purdue group began in 2004, when they reported that animals consuming saccharin-sweetened liquids and snacks tended to eat more than animals fed high-calorie, sweetened foods. The new study, say the scientists, offers stronger evidence that how we eat may depend on automatic, conditioned responses to food that are beyond our control. (See a special report on the science of appetite.)

What they mean is that like Pavlov’s dog, trained to salivate at the sound of a bell, animals are similarly trained to anticipate lots of calories when they taste something sweet — in nature, sweet foods are usually loaded with calories. When an animal eats a saccharin-flavored food with no calories, however — disrupting the sweetness and calorie link — the animal tends to eat more and gain more weight, the new study shows. The study was even able to document at the physiological level that animals given artificial sweeteners responded differently to their food than those eating high-calorie sweetened foods. The sugar-fed rats, for example, showed the expected uptick in core body temperature at mealtime, corresponding to their anticipation of a bolus of calories that they would need to start burning off — a sort of metabolic revving of the energy engines. The saccharin-fed animals, on the other hand, showed no such rise in temperature. “The animals that had the artificial sweetener appear to have a different anticipatory response,” says Susan Swithers, a professor of psychological sciences at Purdue University and a co-author of the study. “They don’t anticipate as many calories arriving.” The net result is a more sluggish metabolism that stores, rather than burns, incoming excess calories.

Swithers stops short of saying that the animals in her study were compelled to overeat to compensate for phantom calories. But she says that the study does suggest artificial sweeteners somehow disrupt the body’s ability to regulate incoming calories. “It’s still a bit of a mystery why they are overeating, but we definitely have evidence that the animals getting artificially sweetened yogurt end up eating more calories than the ones getting calorically sweetened yogurt.” 

Though it’s premature to generalize based on animal results that the same phenomena would hold true in people, Swithers says, she notes that other human studies have already shown a similar effect. A University of Texas Health Science Center survey in 2005 found that people who drink diet soft drinks may actually gain weight; in that study, for every can of diet soda people consumed each day, there was a 41% increased risk of being overweight. So even though her findings were in animals, says Swithers, they could lead to a better understanding of how the human body responds to food, and explain why eating low-calorie foods doesn’t always lead to weight loss. “There is lots of evidence that we learn about the consequences about eating food,” she says. “And we have physiological responses to food that are conditioned.”

So does that mean you should ditch the artificial sweeteners and welcome sugar back into your life?

Not exactly. Excess sugar in the diet can lead to diabetes and heart disease, even independent of its effect on weight. But it’s worth remembering that when it comes to counting calories, it’s not just the ones you eat that you have to worry about. The calories you give up matter too, and they may very well reappear in that extra helping of pasta or dessert that your body demands. Your body may actually be keeping better count than you are.

The Neuroimmune Basis of Anti-inflammatory Acupuncture

Ben Kavoussi, MS

Southern California University of Health Sciences, College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, Whittier, CA, kavoussi@ucla.edu

B. Evan Ross, DOM, LAc

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Department of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA

This review article presents the evidence that the anti-inflammatory actions of acupuncture are mediated via the reflexive central inhibition of the innate immune system.

Both laboratory and clinical evidence have recently shown the existence of a negative feedback loop between the autonomic nervous system and the innate immunity.

There is also experimental evidence that the electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve inhibits macrophage activation and the production of TNF, IL-1ß , IL-6, IL-18, and other proinflammatory cytokines.

It is therefore conceivable that along with hypnosis, meditation, prayer, guided imagery, biofeedback, and the placebo effect, the systemic anti-inflammatory actions of traditional and electro-acupuncture are directly or indirectly mediated by the efferent vagus nerve activation and inflammatory macrophage deactivation.

In view of this common physiological mediation, assessing the clinical efficacy of a specific acupuncture regimen using conventional double-blind placebo-controlled trials inherently lacks objectivity due to (1) the uncertainty of ancient rules for needle placement, (2) the diffuse noxious inhibitory control triggered by control-needling at irrelevant points, (3) the possibility of a dose-response relationship between stimulation and effects, and (4) the possibility of inadequate blinding using an inert sham procedure. A more objective assessment of its efficacy could perhaps consist of measuring its effects on the surrogate markers of autonomic tone and inflammation.

The use of acupuncture as an adjunct therapy to conventional medical treatment for a number of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases seems plausible and should be validated by confirming its cholinergicity.

Sick but at work? Study finds it’s worse in the long-run

Thu Jun 11, 1:03 am ET

SYDNEY (Reuters Life!) – Sick but still going to work?

You’ll probably end up taking more sick days in the future than colleagues who stay at home when unwell,

according to a Swedish study.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm found that employees who often go to work feeling sick — termed “sickness presenteeism” – have higher rates of future work absences due to illness.

Gunnar Bergstrom, who led the study, said these findings suggest that measures attempting to decrease work absences could inadvertently have the opposite effect and show that taking sick-leave when appropriate benefited the workplace.

“Discouraging workers from staying home when they are sick could lead to increased sickness presenteeism, and thus inadvertently increase sick leave,” Bergstrom said in a statement.

“This underscores the importance of sickness presenteeism in the evaluations of such interventions and considering the effects from a long-term perspective.”

The study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, was based on research involving two groups of workers — about 3,750 public sector employees who were mainly female, and 2,500 private-sector employees who were mainly male. In the first year of the study, 19 percent of public sector workers and 13 percent of private sector workers had more than five “sickness presenteeism” days.

For these workers, the risk of having more than 30 days of sickness absenteeism the following year was 40 to 50 percent higher that for employees who had less days sick in the office, after adjustment for other factors.

Bergstrom said recent studies have shown that sickness presenteeism is common, with most employees saying they go to work sick at least sometimes.

Poor health is one likely risk factor for sickness presenteeism, but other job-related and personal factors could also play a role, according to the researchers.

(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Miral Fahmy)