Natural remedy support for surgery

As I seem to have been having a number of friends in hospital recently, I thought it might be timely to remind you of my pre-hospital routine if you are undergoing surgery and to add in some news about the interaction between herbs, drugs and hospitals. My own pre-surgery routine is very simple: three days beforehand I start taking Arnica 30 twice a day, plus Rescue Remedy in water. The arnica deals with trauma and emotional shock before the operation, and helps recovery of internal bruising faster and I usually ask the nurse in charge to make sure it’s under my tongue the minute I wake up and Rescue Remedy helps again with any fears arising from the operation. I keep up this regime up to a week after the operation and add in at least a gram of vitamin C as it is essential both to help support your immune system and recover from any anaesthetic by helping remove it faster from your system.

Herbs and Surgery: As more people are regularly taking supplements and vitamins as part of their healthcare routine, this timely report comes from a US team from the Department of Plastic Surgery at Cleveland’s University Hospital. They are giving this list to any patient who is undergoing surgery, for whatever reason, and I thought you would like to know about it.

* For bleeding effects: gingko biloba, garlic, ginseng, dong quai, feverfew, fish oils

* For drug interactions: echinacea, goldenseal, liquorice, St. John’s wort, kava, valerian root

* For cardiovascular effects: ephedra, garlic

* For anaesthetic effects: valerian root, St. John’s wort, kava

* For photosensitivity effects: St. John’s wort, dong quai

* For hypoglycaemia effects: ginseng

Help with inflammation

I am indebted to Julie for contacting me about a natural product she has found very helpful to reduce inflammation, pain and swelling in both adults, children and animals. It’s name is serrapeptase and as most diseases have inflammation as a major factor then it could have a number of applications and clinical use. This natural anti-inflammatory is derived from silkworms has been in use for over twenty-five years throughout Europe and Asia as a viable alternative to salicylates, ibuprofen and the more potent NSAIDs. Unlike these drugs, Serrapeptase is a naturally occurring, physiological agent with no inhibitory effects on prostaglandins and is devoid of gastrointestinal side effects.

For more information, and a free report on what serrapeptase can do, then visit the website at www.Serrapeptase.info

Prostate and pomegranates

There’s new hope for men with prostate cancer when their disease doesn’t respond adequately to standard medical care. According to the results of a six year study just published in the Journal of Urology, pomegranate juice can lower PSA levels and slow down the progress of prostate cancer.

This was a two-stage clinical trial where each research subject had a rising prostate specific antigen (PSA) level after surgery or radiation therapy greater than 0.2 ng/ml and less than 5 ng/ml. The study participants were given eight ounces of pomegranate juice to drink daily for several years. Then patients who remained in the study and drinking pomegranate juice were compared to those no longer participating in the juice regimen.

Though both these groups of men with prostate cancer had demonstrated similar mean PSA doubling times at baseline when the study began, there was a clear and important difference in the groups after 56 months. The researchers are cautious about suggesting pomegranate juice could prevent prostate cancer, but anyone receiving treatment could add it to their diet and be getting a range of other health benefits.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK and over the last 30 years rates in Great Britain have almost tripled, although much of the increase is due to increased detection through widespread use of the PSA test. Prostate cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in UK men, after lung cancer, though happily the survival rate has more than doubled. Around 7 in 10 newly diagnosed prostate cancer patients now survive beyond five years whereas in the 1970s it was only 3 in 10.

Pomegranate juice benefits for everyone As it has very good antioxidant properties, it has been evaluated for its usefulness in fighting certain forms of cancer and been tentatively shown to reduce incidence of breast and skin cancer. It has many health benefits particularly for heart disease, heart attacks and stroke.

These include:

• it works well as a blood thinner
• is an agent for promoting blood flow to the heart
• reduces plaque in the arteries
• raises “good” levels of cholesterol
• helps lower “bad” cholesterol

Gold particles to treat tumours

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) researchers have been working on a difficult problem. Heat is an effective weapon against tumour cells, but the difficulty has been to heat patients’ tumours without damaging nearby tissues. The solution turns out be golden – in fact tiny gold particles that can home in on the tumour, and then, by absorbing energy from near-infrared light and emitting it as heat, destroy them with virtually no side effects.

Gold nanoparticles can absorb different frequencies of light, depending on their shape. Rod-shaped particles, such as those used in the research, absorb light at near-infrared frequency; this light heats the rods but passes harmlessly through human tissue. Once the nanorods are injected, they disperse uniformly throughout the bloodstream and then into blood vessels located near tumours which have tiny pores just large enough for the nanorods to enter. The nanorods then accumulate in the tumours, and within three days, the liver and spleen clear any that don’t reach the tumour itself.

During a single exposure to a near-infrared laser, the nanorods heat up to 70 degrees Celsius, hot enough to kill tumour cells, and at a lower temperature they weaken tumour cells enough to enhance the effectiveness of existing chemotherapy. Another use for this treatment is to kill tumour cells left behind after surgery. The nanorods can be more than 1,000 times more precise than a surgeon’s scalpel, and so could potentially remove residual cells the surgeon can’t get at.

The statistics on cancer are daunting. There are currently around 7 million people worldwide diagnosed and that number is projected to grow to 15 million by 2020. As the majority are treated with a combination of chemotherapy and/or radiation, they are subject to debilitating side effects because of the difficult in accurately targeting tumour tissue. At present, 99 percent of chemotherapy drugs are estimated to not reach the tumour, but the gold nanorods can specifically focus heat with a much greater accuracy to destroy the tumour.

Folic acid may help treat allergies and asthma

This is the season when allergies can begin to make themselves felt and among natural remedies available, including bee pollen, there is now new evidence that folic acid, or vitamin B9, may also suppress allergic reactions and lessen the severity of allergy and asthma symptoms. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, carried out at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in the US, and reported in the Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology.

The link between blood levels of folate – the naturally occurring form of folic acid — and allergies adds to increased evidence that folate can help regulate inflammation which is at the root of allergic reactions. This research showed that people with the lowest folate levels had a 30 percent higher risk of developing allergies and a 31 percent higher risk of allergic symptoms than people with the highest folate levels. On the asthma front, there was a 16 percent higher risk of having asthma in those with the lowest folate levels.

Asthma affects more than 5 million adults and children in the UK, and is the most common chronic condition among children. Environmental allergies have an even wider reach so anything that helps strengthen your system to resist them has to be worth considering, particularly if you are already suffering from allergies.

The researchers say it’s too soon to start recommending folic acid supplements to prevent or treat people with asthma and allergies, but you could check how many of the folic-deficiency symptoms you have from this list:

* Irritability
* Mental fatigue, forgetfulness, or confusion
* Depression
* Insomnia
* General or muscular fatigue
* Gingivitis or periodontal disease

Adult men and women (except during pregnancy) are recommended to have 400 micrograms of folate a day and many cereals and grain products are already fortified with it so you may be getting enough. If you think you might be deficient then you might want to increase, or add, excellent food sources such as broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, spinach, green peas, avocado, banana, lentils and nuts.

Eggs are eggselent!

I was talking to a friend recently who seemed unaware that the great debate on the cholesterol contained in eggs had been overturned. As she loves her egg and toast soldiers she was limiting herself to one a week but it is now over two years since the British Heart Foundation (BHF) accepted that the evidence on eggs contributing to high blood cholesterol was unfounded.

Research at the University of Surrey has also recently confirmed that the evidence that eggs raise cholesterol levels is based on out-of-date evidence from research done on powdered eggs.

Eggs are little powerhouses of nutrition, containing protein, essential amino acids, vitamins B, D, A, and riboflavin, and minerals, including calcium, potassium, and iron. They are also one of the few good sources of sulphur, which is essential for oxygen transport in the cells – see the story on swine flu. A lack of oxygen can lead to increased cancer risk as well as encouraging fungus, bacteria and mould in the body as they cannot survive when good supplies of oxygen are present.

Yet another reason to have a healthy, real, diet and why were they testing powdered eggs anyway and not actual eggs? Those previous finding for high cholesterol were based on the fact that the problem has always been oxidised cholesterol – cholesterol heated and exposed to air for an extended period. So a boiled egg presents no problem because the yolk sac insulates the cholesterol from oxidation – line up those toast soldiers and plan a long campaign!

Get nut cracking to improve your motor skills

My memories of Christmas always include struggling with the nutcracker and sending shards of shells flying across the room. Brazil nuts were the most intractable, but I liked their taste, whereas walnuts were hard work and I wasn’t very keen on their slight oiliness – though that may have been because they had been sitting in the bowl too long.

Now however I might have to change my mind as some new research shows that adding a moderate, but not high, amount of walnuts to an otherwise healthy diet may help the over 50′s to perform better at tasks that require motor and behavioural skills. Walnuts contain polyphenols, of which I have spoken in praise before, as well as other antioxidants and essential fatty acids.

The study appeared recently in the British Journal of Nutrition and they were looking at the fact that as we age our brain undergoes a number of changes that can result in altered or impaired functioning. Partly this is due to the fact that the ability of the connections between neurons to change in strength and function is lessened, and that there is also increased oxidative damage to our neural tissue.

The trial was done on rats as they apparently have similar brain makeup to ours – which gives me food for thought about some of my acquaintances, but never mind – and they were put on a diet which had either 2, 6 or 9 percent walnuts in it and a trial group that got no walnuts at all. The study found that in the older rats, the diets containing 2 or 6 percent walnuts were able to improve age-related motor and cognitive shortfalls, while the 9 percent walnut diet impaired reference memory.

In human terms, this means that if you eat 7 to 9 walnuts, a day then you could be positively affecting your cognitive and your motor skills, but no more than that or your memory might be affected. Another benefit is that you will also be providing yourself with exercise as you attempt to crack the nuts, in the shell is fresher, but watch out for those flying shells!

Acupuncture can help radiotherapy patients

An uncomfortable and unpleasant side effect of radiotherapy for patients being treated for head and neck cancer can be xerostomia; a severely dry mouth. A new study in Texas at the M.D.Anderson Cancer Center has proved that twice weekly acupuncture treatments can help relieve this debilitating side effect.

People who have cancers of the head and neck typically receive large cumulative doses of radiation which affect the salivary glands, so that they are then not able to produce adequate amounts of saliva to lubricate the mouth and this is when xerostomia develops. This is not a trivial matter, as symptoms can include an altered ability to taste, dental decay, infections of the tissues of the mouth, and difficulty with speaking, eating and swallowing.

Suggested aids are things like chewing gum or lozenges to encourage saliva production, but these can only bring very temporary short-term relief. The most commonly prescribed medication, pilocarpine, has short-lived benefits and side effects including sweating, stomach upset, runny nose, flushing, chills, dizziness, weakness, and frequent urination. This drug may also affect vision, especially at night.

This pilot study was set up to see if acupuncture could reverse this, and although it is frequently used to manage pain and restore health it had never been tried for this particular condition. The patients in the study had xerostomia and had completed radiotherapy at least four weeks earlier. They were given two acupuncture treatments each week for four weeks and the acupuncture points used in the treatment were located on the ears, chin, index finger, forearm and lateral surface of the leg. All patients were tested for saliva flow and asked to complete self-assessments and questionnaires related to their symptoms and quality of life before the first treatment, after completion of four weeks of acupuncture, and again four weeks later.

The twice weekly acupuncture treatments produced highly statistically significant improvements in symptoms and a quality-of-life assessment conducted at weeks five and eight showed significant improvements over quality-of-life scores recorded at the outset of the study. Further studies are underway at Fudan University Cancer Hospital in Shanghai, China, to see if having acupuncture treatments on the same day as the radiotherapy will produce the same results.

If you know anyone who is suffering from this condition, do share this article with them and suggest they seek a qualified acupuncturist if they wish to try it for themselves.

Achilles heel? Try ultrasound not surgery

Damage to the Achilles Tendon (tendonitis) is no joke, and it doesn’t just happen to athletes as it is quite common in the general population and strikes men and women equally – though not everyone has the same susceptibility. Your tendon is subject to daily impact as you stride (or run) your way through life, and they are definitely designed very much for strength. Unfortunately, they have relatively little in the way of blood vessels associated with them which means they are slow to repair themselves. The usual treatment suggested is plenty of rest and ice packs, heel lifts, orthotic insoles for the shoes, and NSAID’s like ibuprofen and physical therapy. If these are not effective then surgery is the next option.

Now, however, a new study at the Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University in Chicago, USA, has come up with an alternative solution. The patients involved underwent ultrasound-guided debridement, of the tendon. This is a procedure that helps to break up any scar tissue within the tendon that might cause it to become stiffer than normal. The debridement stimulates an in-growth of blood vessels and results in a healing response which encourages the body’s own repair process to heal the tendon damage.

The procedure had a 60% success rate in the study with patients reporting either marked improvement in their symptoms, or that they had stopped entirely. For the patients in the trial it meant they could avoid surgery, and it looks promising to help others who have reached the end of the treatment road but don’t want to go under the knife.

Anti inflammatory drugs without serious side effects

Those suffering from inflammatory conditions such as asthma and other chronic diseases are usually prescribed corticosteroids, and although these are highly effective they do carry the risk of some serious side effects. Of particular concern is when they are used to treat a child’s asthma, but these drugs can stunt their growth over time. In adults, they are used to treat Addison’s disease, but again their use can lead to the development of diabetes and hypertension.

Dr. Henry J. Lee has led research in anti-inflammatory, anti-AIDS and anti-cancer drugs for nearly 30 years and he and his team have been working to develop a safer approach that would eliminate inflammation without causing damage to the body. Reported to the MLA American Physiological Society on April 19, these so-called “antedrugs”, have now been developed at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, at Tallahassee in Florida.

Antedrug design is a new approach to create safer drugs that attack a problem such as inflammation then quickly become inactive before they can cause damage. The researchers were able to synthesize a new group of corticosteroids that have anti-asthmatic and anti-inflammatory properties that are isoxazoline derivatives, from prednisolone, and without adverse side effects or any systemic damage.

In fact, they found that antedrugs effectively reduced inflammation and were five times more potent than prednisolone in doing so.

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