Category Archives: Integrative Medicine

Suffering from run-ruining respiratory issues like asthma, bronchitis or congestion? Theres a spa fix you might see in your search for solutions: salt. Yep, those pretty pink caves youve seen on Insta with walls and blocks of salt may offer a treatment known as halotherapy a practice that involves sitting ina cool, salt-filled room to improve health.

Proponents claim it brings big benefits like relief from breathing difficulties, healing for various skin conditions and total relaxation.

Truth is, some perks have science behind them and others you may want to take with, er, a grain of salt (had to!).

SORT OF.

The thinking is that sitting near salt draws water out of your respiratory tract, reducing inflammation and alleviating issues. But that hasnt been confirmed by studies yet. That said, some doctors supplement mainstream options like inhalers with salt therapy, says Dr Nisha Chellam, an integrative medicine practitioner. Consult your GP before you try.

VERY POSSIBLE.

Exposure to high concentrations of salt absorbs and flushes out topical probs like bumps and redness, says Dr Rohan Mankikar, a pulmonologist. This makes salt rooms helpful for eczema and dermatitis flare-ups. Good to know.

EH, SKIP IT.

Claims associated with salt lamps are they clear toxins and bad energy. That is, in a word, bogus you wont reap the skin or breathing benefits if youre not inside a sodium-packed space, says Mankikar. But if having one makes you chill, thats a fine self-care choice just dont expect wellness miracles.

NOPE, CAREFUL.

If youre actively short of breath or having an asthma attack, dont head to your salt room; its preventive care, not acute treatment. Also, worth noting: not all salt caves are legit. The space has to have a halogenerator the machine that aerosolises the salt into the air to work. Otherwise the room is basically just a lovely lounge. Ask management if the space boasts the machine. And do your due diligence pre-arrival: check customer reviews regarding relief, get a room tour, and inquire about the practices.

Read more:
Is Salt Therapy A Natural Way To Breathe Easier, Stress Less, And Look Radiant? - Women's Health

Newswise WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. April 25, 2022 Between 40% and 60% of patients who have an opioid use disorder (OUD) also experience chronic pain. While both of these conditions have been studied separately, very little research has been done to address the needs of patients who have both.

To fill this gap, researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine have been awarded a five-year, $4 million grant through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Helping End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative.

With the grant, researchers will create an Integrative Management of Chronic Pain and OUD for Whole Recovery (IMPOWR): Coordination Center for a network of clinical research centers that includes the University of New Mexico, Yale University, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the University of Pittsburgh.

Through the Center, the School of Medicine will coordinate and support the network in the development, evaluation and implementation of patient-centered interventions with each research center conducting two to three clinical trials.

Traditionally, treatments for these conditions have been very siloed, said Dr. Meredith C.B. Adams, principal investigator and assistant professor of anesthesiology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. There are interventions to treat chronic pain. There are interventions for opioid use, misuse or disorder, but what about treatments for people who have both? Our objective is to find effective interventions to make sure were addressing patient pain while also avoiding an escalation of opioid use disorder.

Another key component of the project will be decreasing stigma associated with these conditions, improving health equity and diminishing health disparities through educational development.

Part of addressing this crisis is understanding patient and community needs, Adams said. Many people with co-occurring chronic pain and opioid use disorder do not seek treatment because of the stigma associated with these conditions. We hope to change that.

The NIH HEAL Initiative, which launched in 2018, was created to find scientific solutions to stem the national opioid and pain public health crises.

Link:
NIH Awards Wake Forest University School of Medicine $4 Million Grant to Study Chronic Pain and Opioid Use Disorder - Newswise

The Issue

The world had taken a deep break and was having doubts about continuing to revolve, Maya Angelou says in her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. What if the world has started revolving and it is you who has doubts about continuing to revolve in it?

This is a totally normal response to an extraordinary life event that to some may not seem real and to others who have lost loved ones, work, finances, friends, and even a part of themselves, it is all too real. You cannot un-feel it. How do we begin revolving again at our own comfort level? Or maybe you do not want to revolve endlessly as in pre-pandemic life because, in your mind-without having to explain or justify it-it is just too risky. What if both answers were acceptable and there was no wrong way for any one person to re-acclimate to before times?

Busy Busy Americans

Pre-pandemic, there were idiosyncratic sayings like FOMO and YOLO mirroring the pioneering American spirit of seizing the day. If you work hard enough at work, at nutrition, at health, it was essentially all in your control, including planning your day. Pre-pandemic life was filled with the illusion that we were in control of our work, relationships, and daily habits. We loved to be so busy with work, busy with friends, working out, family, etc. That ended abruptly and everyones life was literally stopped, and unfortunately for so many, literally.

Pandemic FOMO

Pandemic FOMO is a real thing that people are experiencing as the world opens again, though many are not quite ready for it to go back to the way it was-and still, countless others who may have different risk tolerance or physical ailments, who may need more time before getting back to any sense of normalcy, if at all. That is the thing about pandemic FOMO, that it is out of our control depending on all of our individual risk factors or idiosyncrasies, and life may not look at all like what it looked like back in February of 2020. There are (by choice or by not) radical changes that have shifted peoples identities, relationships with friends and families, and work that may be forever altered or lost. All of this is contributing to a collective, familial, and individual trauma in addition to the major life disruptions that have happened globally.

Trauma: The Pandemic Created a Global, Collective, and Individual Trauma

Carl Jung, Americas spiritual psychologist, was the first to discuss collective, family, and individual trauma. These all run together and are each distinct. Until we acknowledge the struggle, we cannot integrate a new way of living, being, and communicating. Although we have less control now than we thought we did over what happens to us (psychologists and doctors have always realized that we have less control over our lives than we want to accept on a conscious level), our self-agency has had to bolster itself to get through this time. It is not an easy adaptation backward. The pandemic has also emboldened a culture of rudeness and entitlement-part of the Are you in? or Are you out? paradigm that has emerged. This is low-level, crisis, animal brain thinking and functioning.

Healing From Trauma: High-Level Thinking

To heal from trauma, we must slow down and shed the fight or flight and busy busy busy all the time mentality so prevalent in American culture. All the busyness before the pandemic did not leave time or facilitate the existential dilemma many of us are dealing with as the world reopens and we may not be ready for it to do so. The pandemic also exposed many other viruses that the world is fighting, such as poverty and inequity. Like a Band-Aid being ripped off, many of us are newly aware of the gravity of ills and inequities exposed from the convergence of events in the spring/summer of 2020, and we are without healthy coping mechanisms for the new reality that pre-pandemic life is gone and we are in a new phase of integration. In general, Americans are not comfortable with thinking that they are not in control of their lives, their work, finances, etc., and integrating the new reality takes new skills of adaptation we have not seen or needed before.

Adapting and Integrating to the New World

One virus that no one discusses but goes to the heart of the issue (now that we have been forced to have the space to face existential questions of identity and self) is how people were able to take the time to reflect and ask, Am I happy being so busy? Am I comfortable with the world reopening? Why am I the only one with a mask on? Or how you may not have felt comfortable when your friends invited you to a concert and it puts a real rift in the connection. It seems that because without mindful adaptation, people are using binary models as a primitive fight or flight response-and the You are either with us or against us mentality seems present. It is not so simple at all. The pandemic has exposed our hearts to ourselves and made us rethink what is right on an individual level that may not flow with friends or family or work anymore We have to dig deep to communicate these differences in risk tolerance without disrupting those connections because there is still hope that one day we will get to a new normal.

How to Fix It? Remedies for Pandemic FOMO

Practice mindfulness. What am I feeling? Really focus on the emotion, whether it is joy or grief or sadness-do not judge it; just be with it-and slowly breathe in and out through the emotion not trying to change it or fix it. Just let it be and it will pass with deep breathing and some gentle mindfulness.

Practice radical self-acceptance. Acknowledge that we all have different motivations and reasons and accept that we all have to make, live or die by our choices; so, it is critical to honor yourself without judgment or criticism. It is okay if you are fearful and uncomfortable. There is no race or timetable to get back to the busyness of the world.

Practice radical self-care. Grounding every day by walking in grass, taking a bath with Epsom salts (widely believed in the integrative medicine field to calm the nervous system), and treating yourself as you would treat your grandparent or child if he or she were sick. Practice that kindness on yourself, especially in a world that is moving faster and more abruptly than we would want it to.

All we are is dust in the wind. Practice aligning yourself with a universal presence-could be spirituality, could be religion, or could just be nature, but find something outside of yourself that is meaningful to you and does not place you at risk if you are not comfortable with everyones different levels of risk-taking.

What Will This Psychobabble Do for Me?

Radical acceptance and radical self-care are the heart and souls way to find resilience and hope. We have to be captains and stewards of ourselves. So, as America enlivens itself again and pushes boundaries that many are not ready to face yet or ever again, we must practice accepting those feelings, whether momentary or lasting, without judgment or reprisal. That is the one thing you can control. You do you. To regain a sense of self-agency, let all else fall away. After all, we must remember that despite everything we have seen and been through, ultimately, the human spirit is resilient, and hope always springs eternal.

About the Author

Hope Phillips Umansky, PhD, Consulting Psychologist, American Culture Professor.

Dr. Hope, as she is professionally known, is an esteemed professor, keynote speaker & author. As a professor, her expertise is in American culture, Writing & Rhetoric, and Leadership. Additionally, after a near-decade as a CEO for a clinical and integrative psychology and integrative health graduate institute, Dr. Hope also now works as consulting psychologist and strategist.

Find Dr. Hope on the web:

Dr. Hopes Psycho-Edu Consulting Site [https://innovationsadvocacy.com]

Hope Health and Healing, Consulting & Integrative Psychology [https://hopehealthandhealing.org]

Dr. Hope On Point [https://www.askdrhope.com]

Available for Media Interviews:

Contact: Jo AllisonPhone: 917-207-1039Email: [emailprotected]Website: http://www.MediaAmbassadors.com [https://www.mediaambassadors.com/dr-hope-umansky]

Or, Contact:

Dr. HopeEmail: [emailprotected]Website: https://www.askdrhope.com

Media ContactCompany Name: Media AmbassadorsContact Person: Jo AllisonEmail: Send EmailCountry: United StatesWebsite: https://www.MediaAmbassadors.com

Link:
#Pandemica: Adapting and Integrating to the New World - Digital Journal

Robert N. Taylor, MD, PhD: One of the questions that has been asked is, can we use these new drugs, the new elagolix kind of drugs, and as I mentioned, I think in the future we'll be having other similar compounds become available. They're in the process of undergoing FDA [United States Food and Drug Administration] approval currently, and we would expect that there might be even more options than these 2 doses of elagolix in the not-too-distant future. Can they be used in association with other kinds of therapies? As we develop a more and more holistic approach to women with endometriosis, and pain in particular, a lot of us are trying to incorporate lifestyle changes, meditation, exercise, as well as certain kinds of more natural remedies to try to help assuage the pain associated with endometriosis. I haven't had experience doing clinical trials with some of these compounds, but I'll tell you that in my own laboratory, I've been very interested in the effects of curcumin-like medications, including some synthetic versions of curcumin that are more biologically active as adjuvants, potentially, to markers for endometriosis pain. Hence, we've been interested in this.

One of the things to be concerned about a little bit is that elagolix is metabolized in the liver, through cytochrome P3A4 enzyme systems as well as the P-glycoprotein. And some of those metabolizing enzymes can be inhibited by certain herbal remedies. St. John's wort is the classic one that actually also utilizes the CYP3A4 pathway, and so with drugs that interfere with that, we might need to be kind of particularly careful. But it is hoped that we can sort of use elagolix as part of a regimen that would include other lifestyle modifications that might actually help with endometriosis pain. There are a couple of real-life challenges in the prescription of these medications. One is that even though the pharmaceutical company has been quite good at providing coupons for discounts on the medication, the cost of the medicine out of pocket is close to $1,000 per month. Some prior authorization issues and insurance formulary issues have come up in the past few years, and I know that a few of us have been kind of frustrated by the challenges to get some of these medications approved for our patients who haven't really been able to respond to other medications. It's been difficult to get patients directly on some of these drugs without having to go through a trial of the first and second level therapies before moving on to these more potent medications.

Transcript Edited for Clarity

See the article here:
Clinical Implications and Integrative Treatment Modalities With Elagolix in Endometriosis - Contemporary Obgyn

MUIHs program provides the essential wellness concepts, the role of herbal medicine supporting the clinical endpoints for cannabis, and quality assurance practices so that a graduate can provide guidance on safe and effective use of cannabis products.

LAUREL, Md. (PRWEB) April 20, 2022

National Cannabis Awareness Month brings attention to the untapped potential of the cannabis plant. Maryland University of Integrative Health (MUIH)s Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Cannabis Science: Therapeutics, Product Design, and Quality Assurance educates students about products with an emphasis on health effects, safety, formulation, and quality assurance. Through this graduate-level academic program students will gain knowledge and skills which are not typically provided by non-credit training programs, and which are valued by employers and important for advancement in the field, including research literacy, critical thinking, and problem solving.

The program teaches the scientific basis of herbal medicine and engages students to develop innovative strategies for commercializing safe and effective products. Students develop the research literacy skills to identify and describe evidence-based clinical applications of cannabis. Unique to this program, students will explore ways to combine cannabis with other herbs to optimize health benefits and reduce risks.

The Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Cannabis Science: Therapeutics, Product Design, and Quality Assurance program provides education in the following areas:

Whether students seek to be employed in dispensaries and retail, processing and manufacturing, or as a clinician, MUIHs program provides the essential wellness concepts, the role of herbal medicine supporting the clinical endpoints for cannabis, and quality assurance practices so that a graduate can provide guidance on safe and effective use of cannabis products, said Michael Bhodi Tims, PhD, Program Director, Herbal Product Design and Cannabis Science at MUIH. The MUIH Cannabis Program was recently featured on Fox 5 News during a Cannabis Awareness Month interview with MUIHs brand ambassador, Amy Riolo, and Dr. Bhodi Tims who talked about what the Maryland recreational cannabis market can learn from medical cannabis.

Processing and manufacturing are currently two areas where regulation, knowledge, and communication are greatly needed. MUIHs Cannabis program provides the basics for understanding how to design quality, wellness-based products combining herbal medicine and cannabis-based material while complying with reputable standards such as Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), federal and state regulations, and third-party health and safety standards.

About MUIH

Maryland University of Integrative Health (MUIH) is a leading academic institution focused on the study and practice of integrative health and wellness and one of the few universities in the U.S. dedicated solely to such practices. Deeply rooted in a holistic philosophy, its model for integrative health and wellness is grounded in whole-person, relationship-centered, evidence-informed care.

Since 1974, MUIH has been a values-driven community educating practitioners and professionals to become future health and wellness leaders through transformative programs grounded in traditional wisdom and contemporary science. MUIH has more than 20 progressive graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines, offered on-campus and online.

In the on-campus Natural Care Center and community outreach settings, MUIH provides compassionate and affordable healthcare from student interns and professional practitioners, delivering clinical treatments and consultations throughout each year.

For more information about MUIH, please visit http://www.muih.edu or to schedule media interviews, presentations, or events, please contact: kmeyer@muih.edu

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Maryland University of Integrative Health (MUIH) Offers a Unique Cannabis Science Program Focused on Health, Wellness, and Herbal Medicine - PR Web

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Dr. Andrew K. Godwin

The Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center will host a Zoom seminar at 1p.m. on Tuesday, April 26,featuring Dr. Andrew K. Godwin from the Kansas University Medical System, who will discuss liquid biopsies and extracellular vesicles in cancer detection.

Pathologic analysis of tumor tissue biopsies is the gold standard for the initial diagnosis of cancer. However, recently liquid biopsies, which analyze tumor-derived material circulating in the bloodstream and other bodily fluids, are rapidly gaining traction in the clinic. These tests offer considerable potential in oncology, which include early detection, monitoring treatment response and disease recurrence. Liquid biopsy biomarkers include circulating tumor cells, cell-free DNA and extracellular vesicles (EVs). Regarding the latter, EVs are showing great promise as circulating biomarkers. Center among EVs are nano-sized vesicles (40 to 150 nm) of endocytic origin also known as small EVs/exosomes, which are produced and released by most cell types under normal physiologic and in diseased states. sEVs carry cargo representative of their originating cell, including nucleic acids, cytokines, membrane-bound receptors and a wide assortment of other, biologically active lipids and proteins. Since sEVs/exosomes travel systemically throughout the body, efforts are underway to exploit them as potential biomarkers to detect and monitor disease states. Ways to exploit sEVs for cancer diagnostics will be discussed.

Godwin is a leader in the field of translational research and precision cancer medicine. He has dedicated his scientific career to improve the care for patients diagnosed with cancer. He is the Chancellor's Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Sciences Endowed Professor, the division director of genomic diagnostics and the director of molecular oncology at the KU Medical Center and the KU Health System, respectively. Godwin was recruited to the KU Medical Center and Cancer Center in October 2010 after 26 productive years at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, and his engaged participation contributed towards NCI designation in 2012, resulted in him being named the deputy director in 2013.

He is the founding director of the Kansas Institute for Precision Medicine and has received numerous scientific and academic awards, including the 2020 Higuchi-KU Endowment Research Achievement Award in Biomedical Sciences the state higher education system's most prestigious recognition for scholarly excellence. His research program continues to focus on various aspects of both basic and translational research, with an emphasis on early detection of cancer, predictive and prognostic biomarkers, liquid biopsies based on extracellular vesicles, molecular therapeutics, companion diagnostics, clinical trials, cellular therapeutics, cancer immune microenvironment and biosample ascertainment.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact Kimberley Fuller at fullerk@uark.edu.

This event is supported by the NIGMS of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number P20GM139768. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Continued here:
AIMRC Seminar Will Discuss Biomarkers for Early Cancer Detection and Disease Monitoring - University of Arkansas Newswire