Produce Safety

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The above link is to an interesting article about public education regarding food safety. The Local Hazardous Waste Management Program has published a pocket guide ranking produce from high to low for pesticide residue. You may find it illuminating!

Here's the link to download your own "shopper's card":

Download Card

Power-less Nights

After speaking recently with a fellow who makes therapeutic light boxes for seasonal affective disorder, I decided to try out something he recommended. His background is in electromagnetics and he said that since he started turning off the power in his house at the breaker box (except for the fridge and water heater) at night that he's been sleeping like a baby.

I decided to try this experiment myself, and after figuring out which breakers controlled the circuits through our bedrooms, turned off the power the past few nights at bedtime (didn't do the entire house as he recommended).

I must say, although it's early on and the sample isn't large enough for a conclusion yet, my sleep has been much deeper with longer stretches between awakenings with the power off.

Try it out and let me know if you notice a difference.

Feeling Sympathetic?

I was reminded recently of the power and inertia of being stuck in a sympathetic nervous system response for too long. This is the "fight or flight" state where you are wound up and ready for action. Some would call this an anxiety state.

After a troublesome phone call I noticed my body shift into a sympathetic state, then continue to be there for far too long. Call it the power of emotions, or the lack of a body memory of what it feels like to be truly relaxed. How often do you purposefully induce a relaxed state? It was a good reminder for me to do exactly that.

An MD I visited with once hooked me up to a pulse and respiration monitoring device connected to software that showed me exactly where I was on the spectrum of sympathetic to parasympathetic (the relaxed state). It took several minutes of deep belly-breathing and reduced mental activity (some might call this meditation) to move the needle from sympathetic to parasympathetic, but I could attach a visual with the body experience and felt pretty darn relaxed. Then I started thinking of a recent stressor- and slipped right back into shallow breathing, mental noise, and the needle quickly shifted over to the sympathetic side of the spectrum.

This dynamic is similar to the Chinese medical concept of Yin and Yang. Yin is the parasympathetic and Yang is the sympathetic. In our culture many people forget how to relax and create down-time for themselves. So many of us keep way too busy, both in our activities and our minds. We easily become ungrounded and can tend to manic action without being rooted in ourselves.

Maintaining a balance between Yin and Yang is the key to good health. Too much of one without the other leads to imbalances that manifest as health problems sooner or later. Take a few minutes today to try this experiment out for yourself and see how you feel. If you like it, practice it a couple of times a day and try to stay conscious of not "over-doing it".

Exercise: Find a quiet place and dim the lights. Close your eyes and take deep, even breaths that make your tummy expand with each inhalation. Try to let go of thinking, finding the brief spaces in between your thoughts. Keep coming back to the breath if your mind wanders or your breathing becomes uneven. Do this for about 3-5 minutes.

Acupuncture also stimulates a rebalancing of Yin and Yang and some patients find it quite effective for stress management, anxiety and insomnia.

Tai Chi Offered At Our Clinic

Patients will be pleased to hear that we are now offering Tai Chi Chuan classes here at our clinic in addition to the yoga classes.

Tai Chi helps to calm the mind and strengthen the body's energy through slow, graceful movements and concentration on breathing with visualization of internal energy. It is excellent for elderly patients wishing to improve balance and strength, and for younger patients wishing to slow down and connect with themselves in a healthy way.

The teacher for this class is Dr. Dennis Dilday, a local chiropractor who has been studying and teaching Tai Chi for over 20 years. You can reserve a place in the ongoing class by contacting our front desk at (425) 259-2102.

Study shows acupuncture effective for pain during pregnancy

A new study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology focused on acupuncture as a treatment for pelvic and back pain during pregnancy.

Study authors said that acupuncture was superior to standard treatment and physiotherapy.

“Overall, our review finds limited, though promising evidence for the effectiveness of acupuncture in managing pelvic and back pain in pregnancy. In particular, there seems to be good evidence that acupuncture, in addition to standard treatment, is superior to standard treatment alone and stabilizing exercises for well-defined pregnancy-related pelvic pain.

“Given that acupuncture is a relatively safe procedure, these findings should encourage primary health care providers, obstetricians and midwives to consider referring women to trained acupuncturists for management of this common, painful and disabling condition.”

Spring Cleaning: Weight Loss & Detoxification

If you are at all like me, you are shaking off the winter cobwebs and blinking at that bright ball in the sky while you peel a layer off a layer of moss. All joking aside, this was a long, dark, wet winter around these parts.

And now the energy of the seasons points us toward spring cleaning- both externally and internally. Spring is the season associated with Liver energy in traditional Chinese medicine. This is the best time of year for a detox and to begin a weight-loss plan.

Many patients ask me if acupuncture can help with weight loss. I tell them that it can help invigorate the functioning of the internal organs by increasing the circulation through associated meridians. Acupuncture can speed up the detoxification and weight loss process and while it can compliment a larger plan, it is no substitute for being discerning in our personal choices.

There is simply no getting around the reality that "you are what you eat". Look at what you are putting in your mouth and be honest about your daily activity level. Most folks make it a lot more complicated than it really is. I always look for ways to keep it simple.

One way to help the body detox and lose weight at the same time is to make straight forward adjustments to what we are eating. You can remove quite a burden from the internal organs by eating lighter, fresh foods rather than heavy, rich meals.

A simple rule is to shop around the edges of the supermarket- where the live foods are. The center aisles are where the lifeless, processed foods sit in airtight boxes designed to last through a nuclear winter.

A popular diet to reference that is actually very simple and endorsed by the Mayo clinic is the Mediterranean Diet. A simple Google search will give you the run down. It's based on the traditional diet from Crete, where folks would eat up to 9 servings of veggies and fruits daily, eating lean meats and whole-grain breads in moderate quantities, and cook with liberal amounts of olive oil.

Eating your bigger meals earlier in the day helps too, as that is when the digestive organs are functioning at their peak. Eating a big meal at night makes for a sluggish journey through the organs.

As for losing weight, one cannot ignore the age-old law of thermodynamics: balancing calories in vs. calories out. 3500 calories equals one pound of body fat, so the trick is to create a differential that uses more calories going out than are coming into the body. One average bag of potato chips (even the "healthy" kind) contains over 1000 calories! If you can keep it around 2000 total calories in daily food intake and use up 2500 calories a day with a little extra exercise, then you will be losing a pound per week.

Increasing daily activity levels and exercise in moderate amounts, combined with a healthy and balanced diet will yield weight loss over time. The key is patience and persistence. Keeping the changes doable is what makes this kind of lifestyle shift sustainable.

Increased physical activity helps the organs detox in the process. Exercise helps create an internal massage-like action on the organs, circulates lymph and other fluids, and flushes out toxins via perspiration and breathing. Combine this with 2 quarts of water intake daily and healthy, balanced meals and you will be well on your way.