Monthly Archives: May 2017

Vanessa Donald, a 83-year old patient, is receiving acupuncture from Jomo Alakoye-Simmons in his Harlem clinic. (Mary Wang )

Politically-induced stress. That term and variations of it turn up a lot these days, especially in the treatment rooms of the city's acupuncturists and herbalists.

Vanessa Nisperos, a 38-year-old social worker from Brooklyn, said the presidential election triggered many symptoms of distress.

"I found myself having repetitive thoughts and this overwhelming sense of dread," Nisperos said. "It didnt even dawn on me that I was physically experiencing symptoms of shock and traumatic stress.

She sought treatment at Third Root, a holistic health care center in Flatbush, Brooklyn that caters to low income patients and those who feel excluded from mainstream health care.

Jomo Alakoye-Simmons, an acupuncturist at Third Root,said in the months since the elections, he's been seeing all kinds of patients report politically-induced stress, and some of their symptoms are severe.

There was a lot of fear brought up in the LGBTQ community," he said. "Suicide was a serious concern. And then you had folks who were just depressed, not eating anymore and experienced paranoia.

Long before the presidential election, alternative medicine has filled the gaps of mainstream health care for people who feel excluded from it. When Alakoye-Simmons isn't working in Brooklyn, the Harlem resident runsthe Harlem Village Community Acupuncture Healing Center. He said his own neighborhood has long had to rely on self-organized forms of health care.

I grew up in this community seeing the Koch years, the drug epidemic, and the massive neglect that has been going on for decades, he said.

His clinic treats many black patients from the neighborhood, including 83-year-old Virginia Donald. She gets acupuncture for her allergies and asthma, a disease that has takena bigger toll on black communities.

"When I was born, we didnt have a whole lot of doctors to treat black people," Donald said. "And when you did, they didnt care if you died or not."

When Donald started her acupuncture treatments 40 years ago, she visited a Harlem practice that was one of the many community health care centers shaped by the Black Panthers' health activism.

Sociologist Alondra Nelson said the Black Panthers, working together with other activist groups, including the Young Lords, set up community health care centers as a response to a long history of segregation in health institutions. According to Nelson, who authored "Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination," these clinics covered the communities of color that mainstream health care didn't reach.

"This network of clinics was a retort to the state and the emergence of an unwieldy and unsuccessful HMO and private health insurance network," she said. "This didnt provide full access to poor people, and if it did, it often provided them with substandard care."

The Panthers visited China in the 1970s, where they were influenced by the Communist Partys model for health care. The state's program used traditional and cheap methods like acupuncture and tui na massage to treat its poor, rural population. The Panthers translated those principlesinto their own clinics, including the Lincoln Detox Center, which battled the addiction epidemic in the Bronx.

Julia Bennett, acupuncturist and co-owner of Third Root, was trained at Lincoln Detox. She said her practice was shaped by that experience.

"It was in an outpatient building right next to the projects," she described. "People addicted to substance would come in andsit in these wonderful lounge chairs.There were volunteers who would put the needles in, and the patients would just relax.

Though the Lincoln Detox Center shutteredin the late 1970s, Nelson said its history is still relevant today.

What the Panther example offers us is that people cant live without care," she said. "With their backs against the wall, they will draw their resources together to provide health care to local communities.

With the uncertain fate of Obamacare and the ongoingshift in national policies in general its clear some New Yorkers are feeling anxious enough to look beyond the medical establishment. For them, holistic health care isnt a luxury; it's a necessity.

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Politics Stressing You Out? Alternative Medicine is Ready to Help (Again) - WNYC

Many people seem to think that the value of a therapy is determined by its efficacy: a treatment that is highly efficacious must be better than one that is less efficacious. Others seem to believe that it is the safety of a therapy which matters most: a treatment that causes no or few side effects must be good, one that has many is bad.

Such notions might appear logical, but they are mistaken. Things are usually more complicated. Some treatments can cause extremely serious side effects but are still extremely valuable. An example would be chemotherapy; it often causes all sorts of awful problems but, if it saves cancer patients lives, it cannot be bad.

Other treatments might be virtually free of side effects, but they are nevertheless rubbish. Take crystal healing, for instance; it is hard to imagine that it causes any side effects but, as it also does not cure anything, it cannot possibly be a good therapy.

To determine the real value of a therapeutic intervention, we need to consider more than its efficacy alone and more than its safety alone. Obviously, we must look at the balance of the two factors.

When a new drug comes on the market, it has been tested thoroughly for efficacy; we therefore can be fairly sure that it works. But initially we know relatively little about its safety; in particular, we know little about possible rare side effects. Such knowledge requires data not just from the few hundred patients who took the drug when it was tested in efficacy trials, but we need data from a few hundred thousand patients.

To generate this information, drugs are monitored for side effects while they are used in routine practice. Should this post-marketing surveillance throw up any serious problems, the drug might be withdrawn from the market.

But this only applies to conventional medicine. In alternative medicine things are different, sometimes dramatically different. As the value of any therapy is determined by its risk/benefit balance, we would ideally want to know the efficacy and the safety of alternative therapies too. Yet we often dont know enough about either.

Alternative therapies have not been tested for efficacy before they come on the market; they usually were in use long before we had the idea of licensing and regulating drugs. Consequently, we have little or only incomplete knowledge about their efficacy.

On the safety side of the equation, things are even worse. There is no post-marketing surveillance of alternative therapies, and all we know about their risks comes from the occasional case report published in the medical literature. This means that under-reporting of harms is huge, and our data are just the tip of the iceberg.

It follows that any attempt at evaluating a risk/benefit balance of alternative therapies is highly problematic. We usually know too little about both determinants to even begin a reasonable estimation. All we can do in this situation is rely on rough estimates.

If any given therapy generates no benefit because it is not efficacious, we can be sure that its risk/benefit quotient can never be positive. Dividing any finite number for risk, however small, by zero gives an infinitely large figure. We can furthermore assume that, for any therapy that is only marginally efficacious and thus generates only a small benefit, even a very small risk would result in an unfavourable risk/benefit balance.

Finally, we can say that an alternative therapy that is known to cause serious harm, the benefit would need to be substantial for its risk/benefit balance to come out favourable.

And what about those alternative therapies for which we have not enough information to attempt even such rudimentary analyses? Alternative practitioners and their followers tend to think that we must give them the benefit of the doubt. This is a dangerously misguided view.

In the interest of our patients, we ought to consider any intervention to be inefficacious until we have good evidence to the contrary. Similarly, any therapy must be considered unsafe until the time we have sound data showing it is not unduly harmful. Giving alternative therapies the benefit of the doubt is therefore not an option.

Such talk is alarmist, claim fans of alternative medicine. After debating with them ad nauseam, I now have this challenge for them: show me your list of alternative therapies that demonstrably are associated with a favourable risk/benefit balance. Considering that there are more than 400 different alternative therapies and that most of them are used for a wide range of conditions, such a list could potentially be very long indeed.

But I will be modest: if you can list more than a dozen alternative therapies for specific conditions, I promise to never write about the risk/benefit balance of alternative medicine again.

Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor at the University of Exeter, is the author of Homeopathy: The Undiluted Facts and the awardee of the John Maddox Prize 2015 for standing up for science. He blogs at edzardernst.com.

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The harms of alternative medicine: what we see is just the tip of the iceberg - Spectator.co.uk

New Delhi:India and Germany, which worked together on treating osteoarthritis with ayurveda, will collaborate further in the field of alternative medicine, the government said.

The Union Cabinet has approved a Joint Declaration of Intent (JDI) between Germany and India regarding cooperation in the sector of alternative medicine, an official statement said. The collaboration will also enhance employment, it said.

The Cabinet was also apprised of a pact, signed here in April this year, between India and Bangladesh on cooperation in the peaceful use of outer space.

While India has well-developed systems of traditional medicine which hold tremendous potential in the global health scenario, Germany has considerable interest in such a system of medicine, it said.

Noting that the AYUSH Ministry had taken many initiatives for promoting ayurveda in Germany, the statement referred to the collaborative research project between the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences (CCRAS) and the Charite University in Berlin on osteoarthritis of the knee.

The results of the trial are encouraging and the clinical trial demonstrates significant improvement in patients. The study has been completed successfully and is under publication, the statement said.

Initiation of collaborative research, training and scientific capacity building in the field of alternative medicine under the JDI between the two countries would contribute to enhanced employment opportunities in the AYUSH sector, it said.

The financial resources necessary to conduct research, training courses and conferences will be met from the existing allocated budget and existing plan schemes of Ministry of AYUSH.

A delegation led by AYUSH Minister Shripad Yesso Naik had visited Germany in October last year to participate in the second European World Ayurveda Congress.

During the visit, Naik met German Parliamentary State Secretary Ingrid Fischbach and the two sides agreed to begin the process of drafting and negotiating a JDl in the field of AYUSH and natural medicine.

On the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between India and Bangladesh, the statement said it would lead to cooperation in areas such as space science, technology and applications including remote sensing of the earth.

The pact would also enable cooperation in satellite communication and satellite based navigation, planetary exploration, use of spacecraft and space systems and ground system and application of space technology.

The MoU would lead to a Joint Working Group, drawing members from the Department of Space and the Indian Space Research Organisation (DOS/ISRO), and the Bangladesh Telecom Regulatory Commission (BTRC), it said.

Source: PTI

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India, Germany to work together on alternative medicine - Medical Dialogues

The Union Cabinet on Wednesday has approved the Joint Declaration of Intent (JDI) between Germany and India regarding cooperation in the sector of alternative medicine.

The signing of the JDl will enhance bilateral cooperation between the two countries in the areas of traditional and alternative medicine.

Initiation of collaborative research, training and scientific capacity building in the field of alternative medicine under the JDI between the two countries would contribute to the enhanced employment opportunities in the AYUSH sector.

There are no additional financial implications involved. The financial resources necessary to conduct research, training courses, conferences and meetings will be met from the existing allocated budget and existing plan schemes of Ministry of AYUSH.

India is blessed with well-developed systems of traditional medicine which hold tremendous potential in the global health scenario.

Germany has considerable interest in Traditional Systems of Medicine.

The Ministry of AYUSH as a part of its mandate to propagate Indian systems of Medicine globally has taken effective steps by entering into MoU with China, Malaysia, Trinidad & Tobago Hungary, Bangladesh, Nepal, Mauritius, Mongolia and Myanmar.

The Ministry has taken many initiatives for promotion of Ayurveda in Germany with the recommendation and cooperation of the Indian Embassy in Berlin.

One of the major initiatives is the collaborative research Project between the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences (CCRAS) and Charite University, Berlin on Osteoarthritis of the knee.

The results of the trial are encouraging and the clinical trial demonstrates significant improvement in patients. The study has been completed successfully and is under publication.

A delegation led by Shripad Yesso Naik, Minister of State, (Independent Charge), Ministry of AYUSH had visited Germany from October 15 to 19 2016 to participate in the 2nd European World Ayurveda Congress (EWAC) and have interactions with the authorities in Germany.

The Congress was supported by the Ministry of AYUSH.

During the visit a bilateral meeting was held between Hon'ble MoS(IC), AYUSH with the Parliamentary State Secretary Ingrid Fischbach during which both sides had unanimously agreed to begin the process of drafting and negotiating a JDl in the field of AYUSH and Natural medicine.

It is expected that the JDI would give a boost to India-Germany ties and enhance cooperation between the two countries.

(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)

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Cabinet approves JDI between Germany, India on cooperation of alternative medicine - Daily News & Analysis