Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Effect of an office worksite-based yoga program on heart rate variability: a randomized controlled trial

by Ben Colagiuri

Cheema, B. S., Marshall, P. W., Chang, D., Colagiuri, B., & Machliss, B. (2011). Effect of an office worksite-based yoga program on heart rate variability: A randomized controlled trial. BMC Public Health, 11: 578.

[NB - This is a study protocol]

Background: Chronic work-related stress is a significant and independent risk factor for cardiovascular andmore Background: Chronic work-related stress is a significant and independent risk factor for cardiovascular and
metabolic diseases and associated mortality, particularly when compounded by a sedentary work environment.
Heart rate variability (HRV) provides an estimate of parasympathetic and sympathetic autonomic control, and can
serve as a marker of physiological stress. Hatha yoga is a physically demanding practice that can help to reduce
stress; however, time constraints incurred by work and family life may limit participation. The purpose of the
present study is to determine if a 10-week, worksite-based yoga program delivered during lunch hour can improve
resting HRV and related physical and psychological parameters in sedentary office workers.
Methods and design: This is a parallel-arm RCT that will compare the outcomes of participants assigned to the
experimental treatment group (yoga) to those assigned to a no-treatment control group. Participants randomized
to the experimental condition will engage in a 10-week yoga program delivered at their place of work. The yoga
sessions will be group-based, prescribed three times per week during lunch hour, and will be led by an
experienced yoga instructor. The program will involve teaching beginner students safely and progressively over 10
weeks a yoga sequence that incorporates asanas (poses and postures), vinyasa (exercises), pranayama (breathing
control) and meditation. The primary outcome of this study is the high frequency (HF) spectral power component
of HRV (measured in absolute units; i.e. ms2), a measure of parasympathetic autonomic control. Secondary
outcomes include additional frequency and time domains of HRV, and measures of physical functioning and
psychological health status. Measures will be collected prior to and following the intervention period, and at 6
months follow-up to determine the effect of intervention withdrawal.
Discussion: This study will determine the effect of worksite-based yoga practice on HRV and physical and
psychological health status. The findings may assist in implementing practical interventions, such as yoga, into the
workplace to mitigate stress, enhance health status and reduce the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

A systematic review of the effect of expectancy on treatment responses to acupuncture

by Ben Colagiuri

Colagiuri, B. & Smith, C. A. (2012). A systematic review of the effect of expectancy on treatment responses to acupuncture. Evidenced-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2012, Article ID 857804, 12 pages doi:10.1155/2012/857804

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of acupuncture often find equivalent responses to real and placebo acupuncture... more Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of acupuncture often find equivalent responses to real and placebo acupuncture despite both appearing superior to no treatment. This raises questions regarding the mechanisms of acupuncture, especially the contribution of patient expectancies. We systematically reviewed previous research assessing the relationship between expectancy and treatment responses following acupuncture, whether real or placebo. To be included, studies needed to assess and/or manipulate expectancies about acupuncture and relate these to at least one health-relevant outcome. Nine such independent studies were identified through systematic searches of Medline, PsycInfo, PubMed, and Cochrane Clinical Trials Register. The methodology and reporting of these studies were quite heterogeneous, meaning that meta-analysis was not possible. A descriptive review revealed that five studies found statistically significant effects of expectancy on a least one outcome, with three also finding evidence suggestive of an interaction between expectancy and type of acupuncture (real or placebo). While there were some trends in significant effects in terms of study characteristics, their generality is limited by the heterogeneity of study designs. The differences in design across studies highlight some important methodological considerations for future research in this area, particularly regarding whether to assess or manipulate expectancies and how best to assess expectancies.

Medicinal Plants use and Primary Health Care in Sikkim

by Ashok Kumar Panda

More than 80% of the population of Asian and African countries depends on traditional medicine for primary health... more More than 80% of the population of Asian and African countries depends on traditional medicine for primary health care. Local knowledge is becoming increasingly importance in Primary health care system in Sikkim for its geographical habitat and medicinal plants potential.  The paper deals with 23 species of medicinal plants, which are arranged alphabetically. In enumeration, the details include correct botanical names with authority, family to which it belongs, local names, followed by parts used and names of diseases. The studied 23 medicinal plants have been used in 33 common diseases which require primary health care in Sikkim. This study also found the traditional healers are act as health care actors for treating arthritis, fracture, jaundice, diarrhea and respiratory diseases of children with other persistence, long lasting chronic health conditions.

"A Diagnosis for our Times: Alternative Health, from Lifeworld to Politics", by Matthew Schneirov and Jonathan David Geczik [book review]

by David Rier

Contemporary Sociology 34(1):73-75; 2005

"A Diagnosis for our Times: Alternative Health, from Lifeworld to Politics", by Matthew Schneirov and Jonathan David Geczik [book review]

by David Rier

Contemporary Sociology 34(1):73-75; 2005

'The Missing Voice of Critical Illness' Ten Years Later: In Sociology, Still Missing

by David Rier

Presented to the American Sociological Association, 103nd Annual Meeting, Boston, August 1-4, 2008.

Seeing to the distant mountain: diagnosis in Tibetan medicine.

by Eliot Tokar

Tokar, Eliot, 1999, Seeing to the distant mountain: Diagnosis in Tibetan medicine, Alternative Therapies In Health And Medicine, 5(2): 50-58

To make use of an ancient traditional medical system we must first be able to comprehend the singular concepts and... more To make use of an ancient traditional medical system we must first be able to comprehend the singular concepts and language it utilizes to understand and describe health and illness. The diagnostic procedure is the method by which a person's medical condition is interpreted into the epistemological categories and language of medical science. This article provides a description of traditional Tibetan medical diagnosis, and explains how a Tibetan physician perceives and analyzes a presenting illness. It discusses the spiritual, psychological and physical aspects of the Tibetan medical approach to diagnosis. By addressing these issues we can understand what is unique about this system of alternative medicine and how it can inform other models of medical practice.

Preservation and Progress: Using Tibetan Medicine as a Model to Define a Progressive Role for Traditional Asian Medicine in Modern Healthcare

by Eliot Tokar

Tokar, Eliot. 2007, Preservation And Progress: Using Tibetan Medicine As A Model To Define A Progressive Role For Traditional Asian Medicine In Modern Healthcare, Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity, 2(2): 303-314.

The history of Tibetan medicine's development provides an excellent model for planning the appropriate utilization of... more The history of Tibetan medicine's development provides an excellent model for planning the appropriate utilization of 'foreign' medical systems and traditions within a new culture that incorporates progressive approaches for the use of both medical pluralism and integration. This history takes on increasing relevance in the modern world as the practice of Tibetan medicine and other forms of traditional Asian medicine have been spreading in the West where they have been faced with commoditization and the hegemony of biomedicine. In the face of modern globalization, certain key questions have yet to be sufficiently addressed. How can systems of traditional Asian medicine be incorporated into western cultures in a manner that permits them to contribute to our understanding of health and disease while allowing them to retain their own integrity? How can they be utilized to aid in the solution of public health problems that exist in the West? What should be the proper interaction between traditional Asian medical systems (e.g., Tibetan medicine) and biomedicine? To determine the answer to these and other vital questions, we must take into account the many cultural, political, economic and scientific issues that affect the state of both public health and individual healthcare.

The Roots of Tradition: Social Ecology, Cultural Geography, and Medicinal Plant Knowledge in the Ozark-Ouachita Highlands

by Justin Nolan

Geographies of Medicine: Interrogating the Boundary between ‘Traditional’ and ‘Modern’ Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika

by Stacey Langwick

Women's Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine for Fertility Enhancement: A Review of the Literature

by Karen Willis

What motivates general practitioners (GPs) working in integrated medical practices to use complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) as treatment modalities.

by Karen Willis

Midwives Practice CAM: Feminism in the Delivery Room

by Sky Gross

Complementary Health Practice Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, 46-62 (2008). Co-authored with Judith Shuval

This article focuses on midwives who practice complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Israel. After qualifying... more This article focuses on midwives who practice complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Israel. After qualifying as nurses in mainstream biomedical institutions, these midwives have, at some point in their careers, opted to study a variety of CAM skills and practice them in hospital delivery rooms in Israel. The authors explore the relationship of selected elements of feminist ideology to the epistemology of CAM midwives. Seven context-specific themes are viewed as central to their epistemological stance: rejection of the medicalization of birth; a strong belief in the "naturalness" of childbirth; rejection of the overuse of technology; empowerment of women; nostalgia and reverence for the past; centrality of intuition, feeling, and emotion; and active advocacy. In-depth, semistructured interviews were carried out during 2004 to 2005 with 13 midwives. These narratives provided empirical material for a qualitative analysis. Evidence is shown to demonstrate the unique feminist quality of the core beliefs of the CAM midwives.

I'm not ill, it's just this back: osteopathic treatment, responsibility and back problems

by Geraldine Lee-Treweek

Health: an interdisciplinary journal (London) January 2001 vol. 5 no. 1 31-49

Personal responsibility has become a central focus for British health policy, professional ideologies and lay ideas... more Personal responsibility has become a central focus for British health policy, professional ideologies and lay ideas around health. This article focuses upon the issue of personal responsibility and long-standing back problems. It uses material from interviews with osteopathic patients to illustrate the ways that patients’ ideas about responsibility for and control over their symptoms are often moulded by their interactions with health care practitioners. Such interactions often lead to contradictions in patients’ attitudes to their health: passive acceptance of treatment on the one hand and desperate attempts to re-establish some control through self-blame on the other (Taussig, 1992). The article ends by arguing that the osteopathic profession needs to critically evaluate its role in encouraging such contradiction and confusion in patients’ understandings of their health states.

Lee-Treweek, G. (2006) ‘Emotions in CAM: aromatherapists and emotional labour’

by Geraldine Lee-Treweek

published in, The International Journal of Work, Organisations and Emotions. Vol. 2. No.3. 2006

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is an increasingly popular set of therapeutic techniques and holistic... more Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is an increasingly popular set of therapeutic techniques and holistic philosophies.  In the UK it is estimated that one in five people use CAM practitioners in any particular year (Ong and Banks 2001). ‘Other’ (i.e. non-orthodox) forms of healing can be said to have experienced a resurgence of public interest since the 1960s. Many CAM therapies, such as aromatherapy, have only been visible in the health and wellbeing marketplace since then. CAMs represent some of Giddens (1997) ‘new experts’, myriad groups who have sprouted from the desperate late modern need to receive expert services on the self, health, wellbeing and lifestyle. It is unsurprising then that CAMs are keen to push claims about what they can do for the individual: claims about therapeutics and the different notions of the body and emotions that they allege to offer users . Furthermore, (predominantly) working outwith orthodox settings in private clinics or homes enables CAMs to offer a different emotional experience of treatment and therapeutic relationship than that available from other forms of healthcare. Whilst the emotional aspects of treatment are not always advertised by CAM practitioners, it is implicit in their claims to offer a ‘holistic’ or integrated approach to health and wellbeing. However, few studies have explored the emotional content of CAM therapeutic relationships and practitioner beliefs about emotion. 

This paper is concerned with exploring the way that the emotions are worked with by one form of CAM practitioner - aromatherapists. Aromatherapy is a very popular form of CAM, with an estimated 30,000+ registered practitioners in the UK (Aromatherapy Consortium 2005), however, there may also be thousands of others who are practicing but are not registered with main organisations. In this paper data from interviews with 10 aromatherapists who were registered with professional bodies, is used to examine their constructions of emotion, understandings of how emotion impacts upon health/well-being and the way the therapists dealt with their own feelings that arose from the therapeutic relationship.

Lee-Treweek, G. (2002) ‘Trust in Complementary Medicine: The Case of Cranial Osteopathy.’

by Geraldine Lee-Treweek

in Sociological Review Vol. 50, No.1

Trust has been seen as operating within situations in which an individual's ability to assess risk or probability is... more Trust has been seen as operating within situations in which an individual's ability to assess risk or probability is absent and yet they still choose to believe in something. The development of new sets of knowledge in modern societies raises interesting questions about how the public come to trust the ‘experts’ who practice them and there is a paucity of work which addresses how trust ‘happens’ in these new relationships. This paper uses the accounts of patients who use cranial osteopathy to discuss the bases of trust in complementary medicine. It is argued that the practitioner and their therapy is not the basis of patient trust. For the initial attendance the patient relies upon the accounts and credibility of other people (network trust). After this it is the phenomenological work of the patient, who strives to find meaning in the treatments they experience, which is essential to the development of trust relationships. The paper demonstrated that patients mobilise ideas and understandings which they are familiar with to understand the unfamiliar and that it is this process of seeking meaning which is central to the creation of trust.

Lee-Treweek, G. (2002) ‘Trust in Complementary Medicine: The Case of Cranial Osteopathy.’

by Geraldine Lee-Treweek

in Sociological Review Vol. 50, No.1

Trust has been seen as operating within situations in which an individual's ability to assess risk or probability is... more Trust has been seen as operating within situations in which an individual's ability to assess risk or probability is absent and yet they still choose to believe in something. The development of new sets of knowledge in modern societies raises interesting questions about how the public come to trust the ‘experts’ who practice them and there is a paucity of work which addresses how trust ‘happens’ in these new relationships. This paper uses the accounts of patients who use cranial osteopathy to discuss the bases of trust in complementary medicine. It is argued that the practitioner and their therapy is not the basis of patient trust. For the initial attendance the patient relies upon the accounts and credibility of other people (network trust). After this it is the phenomenological work of the patient, who strives to find meaning in the treatments they experience, which is essential to the development of trust relationships. The paper demonstrated that patients mobilise ideas and understandings which they are familiar with to understand the unfamiliar and that it is this process of seeking meaning which is central to the creation of trust.

Chronic Oral Administration of Ginseng Extract Results In Behavioral Change but Has No Effects In Mice Models of Affective and Anxiety Disorders

by Haim Einat

Transmission of knowledge in South African traditional healing

by Robert Thornton

The transmission of knowledge in South African traditional healing. Africa 79(1): 17–34 (Special issue edited by Trevor Marchand and Kai Kress. 2009. Knowledge in Practice: Expertise & the transmission of knowledge, Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh Press, 2009). Links: Africa: http://www.eupjournals.com/journal/AFR [Africa’s Thomson Scientific impact factor for 2007 is 0.395]. International African Institute: www.internationalafricaninstitute.org . [earlier version at Google Docs]:: http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=F.56428b20-93ae-4b97-8cb8-4ec7ff7b90f2 .  DOI: 10.3366/E0001972008000582.  http://www.eupjournals.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E0001972008000582

‘Traditional healers’ (sangomas) in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, are organized into ‘schools’ around a senior... more ‘Traditional healers’ (sangomas) in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, are organized into ‘schools’ around a senior teacher (gobela). Healing is understood by its practioners to be a profession, not a religion or even a spiritual exercise. Healers actively assess the effectiveness of their healing methods, transmit their knowledge to each other, and evaluate each others’ performances in ways that stray far from the mere transmission of ‘tradition’. Clients are likely to pay sangomas as much as they would medical doctors for their services, which are not limited to the medical. Their practices can be divided into roughly six ‘disciplines’: divination, herbs, control of ancestral spirits, the cult of foreign ndzawe spirits, drumming and dancing, and training of new sangomas. The status of sangoma is achieved through an arduous process of teaching and learning through which the student or initiate is simultaneously ‘healed’ and educated to become a member of the profession that coheres around these knowledge practices.

RÉSUMÉ: Les « guérisseurs traditionnels » (sangomas) de la province du Mpumalanga, en Afrique du Sud, sont organisés en « écoles » autour d’un enseignant principal (gobela). L’activité de guérisseur est considérée par ses praticiens comme une profession et non comme une religion, ni même un exercice spirituel. Les guérisseurs évaluent activement l’efficacité de leurs méthodes de guérison, se transmettent des connaissances et évaluent leurs performances entre eux de façons très éloignées d’une simple transmission de « tradition ». Les clients payent souvent les sangomas autant que les médecins pour leurs services, qui ne se limitent pas au domaine médical. Leurs pratiques se divisent en six grandes « disciplines » : la divination, les plantes, la maîtrise des esprits ancestraux, le culte des esprits ndzawe étrangers, les percussions et la danse, et la formation des nouveaux sangomas. Le statut de sangoma est obtenu au terme d’un processus ardu d’enseignement et d’apprentissage au cours duquel l’étudiant ou l’initié est simultanément « guéri » et formé à devenir member d’une profession qui rassemble autour de ces pratiques de connaissance.

Antidepressant-like effects of the active acidic polysaccharide portion of ginseng in mice

by Haim Einat

Jia Wang, Shlomit Flaisher-Grinberg, Shanshan Li, Haibo Liu, Lin Sun, Yifa Zhou and Haim Einat

Journal of Ethnopharmacology 132 (2010) 65–69

Aim of the study: The biological of activity of Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer (ginseng) is complex but some of its known... more Aim of the study: The biological of activity of Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer (ginseng) is complex but some of its known effects are related to affective and anxiety disorders, including the enhancement of neuroprotection, cellular resilience and plasticity. Whereas such effects suggest that ginseng might have antidepressant activity, previous studies show incongruent results. The sources of contrasting results might be many but one possibility is the utilization of different ginseng preparations in different studies. The current study was therefore designed to examine the effects of a very specific component of ginseng extract, the acidic polysaccharide portion of the plant (WGPA), containing arabinogalactan, type-I rhamnogalacturonan (RG-I)- and homogalacturonan (HG)-rich pectins.
Materials and methods: WGPA was extracted from ginseng roots and administered orally to mice at 100 mg/kg and 200 mg/kg doses. WGPA was administered chronically, once daily for 1 week before the start of experiments and throughout the behavioral tests battery. Mice were tested for spontaneous activity, social interactions, anxiety-like behavior in the elevated plus-maze (EPM) and despair-like behavior in the forced swim test (FST).
Results: WGPA had no effects on spontaneous activity or behavior in the EPM. In contrast, 100 mg/kg (but not the 200 mg/kg) WGPA significantly reduced immobility time in the FST and both doses significantly increased social interactions and decreased aggressive behaviors in mice.
Conclusion: These results suggest that chronic WGPA treatment might have antidepressant-like effects that are unrelated to generalized behavioral changes. The results are discussed in the context of the known ability of the active ingredients of ginseng to increase neuroprotection, similar to many of the current antidepressant and mood stabilizing drugs.