Traditional Chinese Medicine May Stall Onset Of Diabetes

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January 17, 2014

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

Traditional Chinese medicine has been around for thousands of years, and a new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism has found a mixture of 10 Chinese herbal medicines called Tianqi may help stall the progression from a pre-diabetes condition to a formal diabetes diagnosis.

Patients are considered to have pre-diabetes when they develop elevated blood sugar levels, but not to the point of those with type-2 diabetes. Those with pre-diabetes face an elevated risk of developing full-blown type-2 diabetes, in addition to heart disease and stroke. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 79 million American adults age 20 years or older could be considered pre-diabetic.

With diabetes evolving into a serious public health burden worldwide, it is crucial to take steps to stem the flood of cases, said study authors Dr. Chun-Su Yuan, a recognized expert of herbal medicine at the University of Chicago. Patients often struggle to make the necessary lifestyle changes to control blood sugar levels, and current medications have limitations and can have adverse gastrointestinal side effects. Traditional Chinese herbs may offer a new option for managing blood sugar levels, either alone or in combination with other treatments.

In the study, nearly 390 volunteers at 11 research sites in China were randomly assigned to take either a capsule containing Tianqi or a placebo three times a day before meals for an entire year. All participants received healthy lifestyle instruction at the start of the trial and met intermittently with nutritionists. Researchers measured participants glucose tolerance on a quarterly basis.

After the year-long trial, 36 participants in the Tianqi group and 56 in the placebo group had developed type-2 diabetes. The study team found that the herbal medicine cut the risk of diabetes by over 32 percent compared to a placebo, after considering participants age and gender.

The team noted that risk reduction seen for Tianqi was as good as that seen in studies of the diabetes medications acarbose and metformin. Tianqi does include herbs that have been found to cut blood glucose levels and boost control of blood glucose levels after meals.

Few controlled clinical trials have examined traditional Chinese medicines impact on diabetes, and the findings from our study showed this approach can be very useful in slowing the diseases progression, said study author Dr. Xiaolin Tong, from Guanganmen Hospital in Beijing. More research is needed to evaluate the role Chinese herbal medicine can play in preventing and controlling diabetes.

Another study on traditional Chinese medicine published earlier this month in the journal Current Biology found that a chemical compound in the Corydalis plant can ease pain in mice. A chemical analysis performed by study researchers revealed a chemical in the plant DHCB was an effective pain reliever in the laboratory rodents.

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Traditional Chinese Medicine May Stall Onset Of Diabetes

Teach Medical Students How To Be Placebos

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Enjoy this guest post from Karan Chhabra, a medical student at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and co-founder of the blog Project Millennial. Connect with him on Twitter at @krchhabra. Placebos work. This isn't news. The term "placebo" was coined 60 years ago to describe how one-third of people respond to pills without any active drug in them. Twenty-five years later, we learned how they work: through endorphins produced by the body that work just like morphine. Today placebos are everywhere: from mothers kissing boo-boos to international drug trials. A recent paper, though, shows that all placebos aren't created equal. As expected, the authors found placebo pills effective for reducing migraines in about one-fifth of patients. But it gets better. Take sham acupuncture, which doesn't target traditional pressure points and doesn't penetrate the skin. Despite being "fake," sham acupuncture reduced migraines in 38% of patients, making it as effective as real migraine drugs. The authors also studied sham surgery, in which doctors give anesthesia and cut the skin, but stitch it back together without doing anything to the tissues underneath. These fake operations helped 58% of migraine patients, potentially even more than active drugs. What does this tell us? It depends on whom you ask. Some might say we need to figure out how to predict a good response to placebo (and are trying to do just that). Others might say we need to test more procedures against shams, to make sure they're effective. Yet others might say sham surgery is unethical outright. These are questions without quick answers. For the rest of us, what can the placebo effect teach us about medicine as a whole? No treatments - drugs, placebos, shams - exist in a vacuum. They're part of a complex ritual of storytelling and listening, examining and touching, teaching and prescribing. Patients expect this ritual and I, like any medical student, am working to master it. Yesterday's medicine might've been a prayer or a poultice; todays it's delivered on blue slips and under blue drapes. But one thing that hasn't changed is that ailing humans want intervention. And the benefits of medicine transcend pills and procedures. Words, touch, and hope can be therapeutic. Wielded inappropriately, they can do harm too. Medicine embraces lots of treatments without proven benefit. Many doctors still stent narrowed blood vessels in the heart when patients have stable chest pain, even though the right pills extend life just as much. (Stents do appear better at preventing pain - but is that another placebo effect?) Some patients with early prostate cancer are also receiving expensive proton beam therapy instead of conventional radiation, again without evidence of benefit. Some doctors may be recommending these treatments for the wrong reasons. But I imagine many are working to satisfy a basic human impulse: to act aggressively in the face of disease. Our bodies respond better to high-touch, high-tech interventions: we get more pain relief from a $2.50 placebo than one that costs a dime. But bigger is not always better. Bigger is often more likely to do harm, through costs or complications.

What I take away from placebo research is that how we do our job is just as important as what we do. The notion that drugs and surgery are the only treatment we can offer has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Medical training and research are decidedly focused on what drugs to give when - knowledge necessary, but not sufficient, to serve our patients. This may distract us from the psychological and social mechanisms beneath the human response to treatment. Rather than inventing a new procedure that might not be more effective than sham, we should be inventing ways to get the benefits of a sham without cutting the skin.

Many of our most common yet most frustrating afflictions have a psychological component: for example back pain, irritable bowel syndrome, and of course headaches. So it makes sense that these conditions have been shown again and again to respond to the placebo effect. It's now our duty to figure out how we can put that power to good use. What combination of advice, empathy, and touch unlocks our body's natural painkillers? Can we be high-touch without being high-tech? Can that be taught? Experienced clinicians may have the answer without even knowing it. But students like myself could use a bit more training on how to be our patients' placebos.

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Teach Medical Students How To Be Placebos

Pre-med, pre-health students can get latest on medical school admissions

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Providing pre-medical students up-to-date information on requirements for medical school, and expanding the diversity within the medical profession, will be the focus of the second annual Pre-Medical and Pre-Health Conference set for Saturday, Jan. 18, at Cal State San Bernardino (CSUSB). The conference will take place 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Broadening Horizons, Empowering Students, Improving Communities is the theme for this years conference. Last year, the conference drew more than 300 participants.

Highlighting a wide professional array of keynote speakers and panelists, the event also will feature a Health Professions and Recruitment Fair, as well as workshops addressing topics such as medical school admissions, writing personal statements and choosing a specialty after completing a residency.

Keynote speakers at the conference will be Stefano Bertozzi, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley; Petros Minasi, director of Pre-Medical Programs Content Development at Kaplan; and Sarah Lopez, currently working under a fellowship in emergency medicine hospital administration at USC.

The conference will open in the universitys Santos Manuel Student Union with the keynote presentations, panel discussions, recruitment fair and lunch. The panel discussions will feature deans of admission from various medical schools.

In the afternoon, conferees will move to CSUSBs College of Education building and Jack Brown Hall for the dozen-plus workshops.

Cost for the all-day conference is $45 at the door. Admission includes all-conference access to keynote speakers, workshops, the health professions fair, a Pre-medical Pre-health Conference T-shirt, breakfast, lunch and automatic entrance into various opportunity drawings.

The conference is organized entirely by CSUSB pre-med students.

To register or find more information, go to the conference website at http://www.csusbpremed.org/.

For more information on Cal State San Bernardino contact the universitys Office of Public Affairs at (909) 537-5007 and visit http://news.csusb.edu.

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Pre-med, pre-health students can get latest on medical school admissions

Emanuel Suter, second dean of UF medical school, dies at age 95

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Dr. Emanuel Suter, a founding leader of the University of Florida College of Medicine, has died at age 95.

A pioneer in medical education at the University of Florida, Dr. Emanuel Suter, died at the age of 95 on Jan. 8 in Charlottesville, Va., where he had lived in retirement.

Suter was the first chair of the microbiology department at UF and became the UF College of Medicine's second dean in 1965.

He was best known for developing a medical curriculum that introduced clinical practice with basic science education and became a model for medical schools across the nation, said Dr. Parker Small, professor emeritus at the College of Medicine.

Since then virtually all medical schools have recognized the need to integrate basic science with clinical medicine, Small said.

Small, who is also a microbiologist, worked with Suter and succeeded him as chair of the microbiology department in 1966.

He was the best boss I ever had -- an unbelievable human being, Small said, describing Suter as rigorously honest, selfless.

He never would take credit for anything. He would work hard on getting something done, getting it to work, and then make sure that someone else got the credit. Small said.

'He created a Camelot where people worked together, Small continued. It was an environment where all chairman had as goal the betterment of medicine.

Suter was born in Basel, Switzerland, and came to the U.S. in 1949 to pursue research on tuberculosis at the Rockefeller Institute, according to a UF media release. He then established an experimental education program at Harvard University that caught the attention of the UF faculty that recruited Suter.

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Emanuel Suter, second dean of UF medical school, dies at age 95