December National Links
A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that the widely used herbal supplement Ginkgo biloba may not help elderly people who are healthy or have only mild cognitive impairment, to prevent Alzheimer's disease if they start taking this supplement too late.
The study led Dr. Steven DeKosky, dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine involved 3,069 apparently healthy people age 75 or older at five U.S. locations. Participants were free of Alzheimer’s or had only mild cognitive impairment.
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A number of Chinese herbs can be useful for the many different facets of Lyme disease. Lyme disease is a bacterial infectious disease caused by the spirochetal organism, Borrelia Burgdorferi. It is usually caused by a tick bite. The prevalence of the disease is greatest in the northeastern United States, but there have been cases of the illness in all lower 48 states.
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Acupuncture is more effective than medication in reducing the severity and frequency of chronic headaches, according to a new analysis conducted by Duke University Medical Center researchers.
The National Institutes of Health recommended acupuncture as a viable treatment for chronic headaches a decade ago and, while research in this field has increased, there have been conflicting reports about its efficacy.
“We combed through the literature and conducted the most comprehensive review of available data done to date using only the most rigorously-executed trials,” says Tong Joo (T.J.) Gan, M.D., a Duke anesthesiologist who led the analysis.
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Health Alliance Plan (HAP) is adding acupuncture and chiropractic services to its Flexible Health Options Benefit for Medicare Advantage members beginning January 1, 2009. HAP's growing list of services to promote wellness encourages Medicare beneficiaries to choose activities and services they want, while putting money back in their wallets.
HAP offers a Flexible Health Options Benefit to members of HAP Senior Plus and Alliance Medicare PPO plans that reimburses members up to $20 monthly ($240 annually) toward the cost of fitness classes, swimming, yoga, Tai Chi, weight training, or other activities at any gym, fitness facility or health club either at home or abroad. Members may also choose a qualified weight management program like Weight Watchers(R), LA Weight Loss(R) or Jenny Craig(R).
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from the Washington Post, Boston Herald, Reuters, Wall St Journal:
More than one-third of adults and nearly 12 percent of children in the United States use alternatives to traditional medicine, according to a large federal survey released today that documents how entrenched acupuncture, herbal remedies and other once-exotic therapies have become.
The 2007 survey of more than 32,000 Americans, which for the first time included children, found that use of yoga, "probiotics," fish oil and other "complementary and alternative" therapies held steady among adults since the last national survey five years earlier, and that such treatments have become part of health care for many youngsters.
"It's clear that millions of Americans every year are turning to complementary and alternative medicine," said Richard L. Nahin of the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which released the survey. "The use of complementary and alternative medicine seems to have stabilized in the United States."
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BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine is an open access journal publishing original peer-reviewed research articles in complementary and alternative healthcare interventions, with a specific emphasis on those that elucidate biological mechanisms of action. BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine (ISSN 1472-6882) is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, CAS, Scopus, EMBASE and Google Scholar.
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