Bowen Therapy: A New Approach

As a sufferer of both neck and back pain on occasion, a believer of chiropractic services, and a big supporter of massage therapy, if someone told me that I could relieve my pain by lying on a table and having my muscles gently manipulated like my spine is at my chiropractor’s office but with none of the cringe-inducing popping sounds, I would probably be skeptical but eager to try it out. Bowen Therapy—named for its founder Tom Bowen, an Australian who found he had a natural gift for finding rhythms and vibrations within the body’s muscles—is the quick, painless, and revolutionary cure long-time sufferers are looking for.

Bowen is safe for everyone (even animals!), from incredibly frail infants to extremely arthritic patients as well as the elderly, and every size, shape, and condition in between. Although Tom Bowen himself claimed an 88 percent success rate during his heyday from its introduction in the 1950s to his eventual retirement in the early 1980s, the feel-good rate is determined mostly by word of mouth because scientific data cannot be processed for this type of body work, although some experimental research has been done.

Some people feel great after only a few treatments and others continue to go every week for the benefits of being more relaxed and feeling more freedom and range of motion in their musculoskeletal system. During a one hour session, the Bowen therapist will find patterns within your muscles and move his or her fingers lightly across the skin to release the tension in that area. Once your muscles are free to relax, your body will be able to adjust according to the pattern the instructor is forming with your tendons. When this happens, the hope is that the body will be able to heal itself and find a balance from within to keep pain from cropping back up in any of your troublesome spots.

After each movement, the therapist or instructor performing the Bowen technique usually leaves the room or pauses for your muscles to realign, allowing ample space between movements, resulting in an hour session (even though each movement is very quick and one Bowen observer has said that it was like the therapist was flicking the patient’s skin). Therapists recommend drinking a lot of water the day of the treatment to get rid of toxins as well as abstaining from any heavy lifting or rigorous exercise that might otherwise strain the body further before or after treatment. Three sessions are recommended to train the body to balance itself and your Bowen therapist may recommend different exercises, stretches, or changing the way you move to do certain tasks in an effort to maximize the potential effects of the Bowen technique.

While reading testimonials from a variety of sources, Bowen seems to be the cure-all from every imaginable source of bodily pain and practitioners can be found all over the world. Besides the expected upper and lower extremity pains, people who have long-standing pain or short bouts from a recent injury including shin splints, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, ear infections, and sciatica to less obviously physical sources of pain like stress, panic attacks, and anxiety have been helped by Bowen Therapy.

Next time you find yourself in the kind of shooting pain that goes right down your back, causes your knee to buckle, or creates a lasting headache from numbing pain, consider Bowen Therapy as an alternative holistic treatment...after all, it doesn’t hurt to try.

Risk of Heart Arrhythmia Can Be Reduced By Omega-3s

In a new study of some 3,000 older adults, those with the highest levels of omega-3 fatty acids in their blood were 30 percent less likely to develop an irregular heartbeat over the next 14 years than peers with the lowest blood levels of omega-3s.

"A 30 percent lower risk of the most common chronic arrhythmia in the United States population is a pretty big effect," said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, senior author of the new report and a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.

According to some estimates, up to nine percent of Americans will develop atrial fibrillation, a heart-rhythm abnormality that can lead to stroke and heart failure, by the time they reach their 80s.

There are few treatments for the condition and they largely center on preventing strokes with blood-thinning drugs.

Some previous studies have suggested that people who eat a lot of fish have a lower risk of developing atrial fibrillation to begin with. But others haven't found the same link.

The omega-3 fatty acids measured in the new study -- eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), docosapentaenoic acid (DPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) - are found in oily fish and some enriched foods, like eggs, as well as in fish oil supplements.

The earlier studies relied on questionnaires about how much fish people ate, which can only estimate the levels of omega-3s they ingested, Mozaffarian noted.

"Any given fish species can vary in its omega-3s by 10-fold," he told Reuters Health.

To get a more accurate measurement of how much fish oil the people in the study actually ingested, the researchers sampled blood from more than 3,300 adults over age 65.

Over 14 years, they tracked the seniors' health and found that 789 had developed atrial fibrillation.

Those with top-25-percent omega-3 levels in their bloodstreams at the beginning of the study were about 30 percent less likely to end up with the arrhythmia compared to those with bottom-25-percent blood levels of the fatty acids.

The difference in risk isn't huge, but "these are meaningful reductions in risk" said Dr. Alvaro Alonso, a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health who was not involved in this study.

A 30 percent reduction in risk would mean that instead of 25 out of every 100 people developing a condition, only about 17 out of every 100 people would get it.

Another study from Finland used the same approach of measuring fatty acids in the blood and found a similar reduction in the risk of atrial fibrillation among those with the highest levels.

Mozaffarian's group tried to tease out which of the omega-3 fats might be responsible for the lower risk, and found that high DHA levels were linked to a 23 percent lower risk for atrial fibrillation while EPA and DPA were not tied to any reduced risk.

DHA is highly concentrated in heart muscle cell membranes, Mozaffarian and his colleagues point out in their report, published in the journal Circulation.

Alonso cautioned that this study doesn't prove eating fish is responsible for the lower rate of atrial fibrillation, but he said there is some idea that the fatty acids found in fish could work by stabilizing the excitability of heart muscle cells.

He said that the results seem promising enough to warrant further studies experimenting with using fish oil as a potential preventive measure against atrial fibrillation.

An earlier study of fish oil pills found that they didn't help the symptoms of atrial fibrillation in people who had already developed the arrhythmia (see Reuters Health story of November 15, 2010).

The American Heart Association, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other groups recommend eating fish at least twice a week.

Mozaffarian said most Americans don't meet those goals.

He said his study "doesn't change current guidelines, but I think this should change people's motivation."

Optimistic Psychology Has Limited Physical Condition Benefits

A psychology technique that encourages patients to think positively and gain confidence helped some with high blood pressure and heart disease stick to medication and exercise goals, according to new research.

But the strategy -- known as positive affect and self-affirmation, or just positive affirmation -- didn't always lead to obvious health benefits. And it's unclear whether any improvements in lifestyle would have continued after the extra encouragement stopped.

"In general, the idea is that as people feel positively about what they're doing, they're more likely to be energized and sustain that over time," said Dr. Geoffrey Williams from the University of Rochester, New York, who wrote a commentary published with three new studies on positive affirmation in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The studies addressed health goals in three groups of patients. In one, African-Americans with high blood pressure were encouraged to stick more closely to their medication plan. In the other two, people who had asthma or who'd recently had a stent inserted into blocked arteries agreed to exercise more.

All patients were given workbooks and made contracts with doctors about their goals.

Half of the participants in each study -- the positive-thinking groups -- also received small gifts in the mail, and were encouraged to incorporate things that made them happy into their everyday lives and to think about proud moments when they were having trouble sticking to their goals.

In the high blood pressure study, the extra encouragement led to limited success. Slightly more people in the positive-thinking group took their medications; in total, that group took 42 percent of its recommended doses, compared to 36 percent in the "control" group. But there was no difference in changes in blood pressure between the groups after a year.

The researchers calculated that 16 hypertensive patients would need to get the extra support, encouragement and gifts for one more to adhere to a medication plan.

The intervention had no clear effect on physical activity in asthma patients. Regardless of whether or not they were given the encouragement and told to think positively, the patients burned an extra 400 calories per week on average by the end of the year-long study.

There was some benefit in patients who received extra exercise encouragement after having a stent inserted. More than half of them surpassed the goal of burning an extra 336 calories per week after a year, compared to just over one-third of patients who were taught about exercise, but didn't get positive affirmation.

"Overall it's safe to say that self-affirmation... can help patients to engage in healthy lifestyle behaviors," said Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe from the New York University School of Medicine, part of the NYU Langone Medical Center, and the lead researcher of the blood pressure study.

The theory of improving health and lifestyle through upbeat thinking is related to the "positive psychology" movement, which encourages the study of happiness, rather than focusing only on mental illness.

Ogedegbe said it's possible that combined with other behavioral strategies and improvements in care, positive thinking and affirmation can lead to actual reductions in blood pressure in some hypertensive patients, as well as other health benefits. But it's unclear from this study if that's the case.

One limit of all the new studies, according to Williams, is that they didn't track whether patients continued to take their medication and exercise after the extra encouragement and gifts stopped -- which would be important if the strategy was going to be useful in the real world.

"We need people to be able to carry this out themselves after we have (finished) working with them," Williams told Reuters Health.

Ogedegbe said that he and his colleagues are currently looking at how well the strategy works in combination with other health interventions, as well as how costly it would be outside of a research study.

For now, he told Reuters Health, "The simple message is that patients have to remain positive, even in the face of obstacles."

20,00,000 more people get safe and sound water to drink

More than 2 billion people have gained access to better drinking water sources, such as piped supplies and protected wells, between 1990 and 2010, U.N. officials said on Tuesday.

The figure means the world has met the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to halve the proportion of people with no safe drinking water well ahead of a 2015 deadline, UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said this was "a great achievement for the people of the world" and noted it was one of the first MDGs to be met.

The Millennium Development Goals are a group of targets set by the international community in 2000 to seek to improve health and reduce poverty among the world's poorest people by 2015.

"The successful efforts to provide greater access to drinking water are a testament to all who see the MDGs not as a dream, but as a vital tool for improving the lives of millions," Ban said in a statement.

A report by the U.N. children's fund UNICEF and the WHO found that at the end of 2010, 89 percent of the world's population, or 6.1 billion people, had access to improved drinking water -- higher than the 88 percent MDG target.

The report estimates that by 2015, 92 percent of the global population will have access to improved drinking water.

"For children this is especially good news," UNICEF's Executive Director Anthony Lake said in a statement. "Every day more than 3,000 children die from diarrheal diseases. Achieving this goal will go a long way to saving children's lives."

Lake cautioned against declaring victory too early, as at least 11 percent of the world's population -- or 783 million people -- still have no safe drinking water, and some 2.5 billion do not have improved sanitation facilities.

The report said the world is still far from meeting the MDG target for sanitation, and is unlikely to do so by 2015. Only 63 percent of the world now have improved sanitation access, a figure projected to increase to only 67 percent by 2015, well below the 75 percent internationally agreed aim.

"Better water, sanitation and hygiene are key to improving human health and development," said WHO Director-General Margaret Chan. "Today, even with this exciting new progress, almost 10 percent of all diseases are still linked to poor water, sanitation and hygiene."

The report said there were still huge challenges in certain parts of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, where only 61 percent of people have access to improved water supplies compared with 90 percent or more in Latin America and the Caribbean, Northern Africa and large parts of Asia.

It also said some 1.1 billion people still defecate in the open because they have no toilets, and the vast majority of them live in rural areas.

To Enhance Brain Memory Can Be Used Tiny electrical shocks

Lightly shocking a person's brain just before they learned a new task appeared to strengthen memory in a handful of patients with epilepsy, a tantalizing result that could have implications for Alzheimer's disease, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

Pacemaker devices known as deep brain stimulators made by Medtronic and St. Jude Medical are already used to calm muscle tremors in patients with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, and are being tested for a host of other conditions such as treatment-resistant depression.

The devices are implanted under the skin in the chest with wires leading up the neck connected to tiny electrodes implanted deep in the brain, which produce electrical impulses.

The current study was done at the University of California at Los Angeles in seven epileptic patients awaiting surgery who had electrodes implanted deep in their brains to help pinpoint the source of their seizures. The team used this opportunity to see how stimulating the brain affects memory.

They focused on an area of the brain called the entorhinal cortex, which helps form and store memories.

"The entorhinal cortex is the golden gate to the brain's memory mainframe," Dr. Itzhak Fried, professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview. The research was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Fried said sensory experiences that eventually become memories pass through this hub before they are stored in the hippocampus, the brain's chief memory center.

For the study, patients played a video game in which they had to shuttle people around in taxis to different shops in a virtual city. The team tested whether stimulating the entorhinal cortex or the hippocampus while they were learning their way around the city improved their recall.

"When we stimulated the hippocampus itself, there was not an effect. It was really stimulation in the gateway to the hippocampus - the entorhinal cortex - where we got the beneficial effect in terms of memory," Fried said.

Compared to testing before stimulation, zapping this part of the brain helped people recognize landmarks and navigate the virtual city more quickly. Fried said the findings suggest stimulating the brain just as memories are forming is key.

IMPACT ON ALZHEIMER'S

In Alzheimer's disease, this area of the brain is affected early on, when signs of dementia begin to appear.

Fried said the study might have implications for treatments for patients with early Alzheimer's disease, but he cautioned that the results are very preliminary.

"The question would be whether this can help memory in patients with memory impairments," he said. Scientists are increasingly focused on ways to treat the memory-robbing disease, which affects more than 5 million Americans.

Despite costly efforts, no drug has been found that can keep Alzheimer's from progressing, and policymakers are growing increasingly worried about the swelling ranks of dementia patients as the population ages.

Suzanne Haber, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York who was not involved in the study, said she was "very excited about the finding," but she cautioned that the treatment is very invasive, very expensive and unproven in Alzheimer's patients.

The Obama administration said on Wednesday it plans to spend an additional $156 million over the next two years to help find an effective treatment for Alzheimer's.

One team has already tried deep brain stimulation in Alzheimer's patients. In a study published in the Annals of Neurology in 2010 researchers tested deep brain stimulation in six patients over the course of a year and found the treatment to be relatively safe. They also saw signs the treatment might have an effect on memory.

Dr. Sandra Black, a brain researcher at the University of Toronto who wrote an editorial on the current study, said the findings could have implications for early stage Alzheimer's disease if tests were developed to identify this process early through imaging or genomics.

"Although the current evidence is preliminary, is based on small samples and requires replication, the potential application of deep-brain stimulation in amnestic disorders is enticing," Black wrote.

E-Prescribing Decreases Medication Errors In Hospitals

A study published in this week's PLoS Medicine shows that commercial electronic prescribing systems (commonly known as e-prescribing, in which prescribers use a computer to order medications for their patients through a system with the help of prompts, aids, and alerts) could substantially reduce prescribing error rates in hospital in-patients.

In the study, led by Professor Johanna Westbrook from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, the authors studied the introduction of the Cerner Millennium e-prescribing system into one ward in one hospital (Hospital A), and used three other wards as controls. At another hospital, the authors compared the error rates on two wards before and after the introduction of the e-prescribing system iSoft MedChart.

The study looked at both procedural (e.g., incomplete, unclear medication orders) and clinical (e.g., wrong dose, wrong drug) orders, and rated the severity of the errors (minor to serious). The researchers found that on the three intervention wards where an e-prescribing system was implemented the procedural prescribing error rates fell by over 90%.

The researchers found that serious clinical errors declined significantly by 44% on the three wards that used the e-prescribing system whereas the serious clinical error rate fell by 16.7% in control wards that did not get the system.

The overall rate of clinical errors (those rated as minor to serious combined) did not fall due to the fact that the e-prescribing systems unwittingly introduced some new types of errors called "system-related errors." These included, for example, when a prescriber accidently selected the wrong drug from a drop-down menu item. These system-related errors accounted for 35% of errors occurring in the intervention wards.

These findings are important as medication errors using hand-written scripts (for example, prescribing the wrong drug or giving a drug by the wrong route), frequently occur in health-care settings and are responsible for thousands of deaths every year.

The authors admit that the study has limitations, such as the lack of randomization and lack of control wards in Hospital B, but conclude: "Implementation of these commercial e-prescribing systems resulted in significant reductions in prescribing error rates with a significant decline in serious errors observed."

For Reduce Pain Massages Base on Science Can help

According to a study published online in Science Translational Medicine by researchers from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario, massages aid the growth of new mitochondria in skeletal muscle, and help to reduce inflammation. Many athletes would attest to the fact that massages help in treating pain, and speed up recovery, but now scientists have the evidence to go along with their testimonies.

The researchers looked at the genetic data of muscle biopsies taken from 11 young men's quadriceps after strenuous exercise sessions on a stationary bike. One of the 11 men was chosen to have one of his legs massaged. Prior to the massage, biopsies had been taken of both legs, another was taken 10 minutes after the massage, and the third, 2.5 hours later.

Massage therapy is the 5th most globally used form of alternative medicine - with about 18 million people taking part in massage therapy methods. Although there have been studies that say long-term massage therapy can help with range of motion and chronic pain, the biological benefits of massage for skeletal tissue were previously unclear.

This study was funded by the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research, and a donation from the Warren Lammert family.