Adequate pain care sorely lacking for patients

Medical science has learned a great deal about the causes of pain and ways to relieve it, pain experts say, but for a host of reasons, the treatment of pain and suffering has improved hardly at all in recent years. John Seffrin, the president of the American Cancer Society, calls this "a national health-care crisis of under-treated pain." "Nearly all cancer pain can be relieved, but fewer than half of our patients report adequate pain relief," Rebecca Kirch, the society's associate director of policy, told a pain seminar in Washington last week. Hospitals do a little better than that in managing pain for patients with all kinds of illnesses, according to a survey to be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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Acupuncture Reduces Painful Side Effects of Breast Cancer Treatments

Ancient Therapy Challenges Benefits of Modern Medicine. A new medical study finds that acupuncture, an ancient form of healing that has been around for thousands of years, is as good as, or better than modern medicine in helping ease the side effects of breast cancer treatment. The findings, which were presented today at the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology's annual meeting in Boston, suggest that this ancient therapy can give cancer patients a wide range of benefits above modern medicine.

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Nerves Tangle, and Back Pain Becomes a Toothache

When people have a heart attack, a classic symptom is shooting pain down the left arm. That symptom, it turns out, has something in common with a far more benign kind of pain: The headache one can get from eating ice cream too fast. Both are examples of what doctors call referred pain, or pain in an area of the body other than where it originates. Such sensory red herrings include a toothache resulting from a strained upper back, foot soreness caused by a tumor in the uterus, and hip discomfort when the problem is really arthritis in the knee.

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Acupuncture Relieves Menstrual Pain

Acupuncture relieves menstrual pain, a German study suggests - Acupuncture can help relieve menstrual pain and improve the quality of life for some women, a new study from Germany shows. Because the acupuncture patients were compared with a control group that received no therapy, rather than a "sham", or fake, version of the treatment, the placebo effect could have played a role, Dr. Claudia M. Witt of Charite University Medical Center in Berlin and her colleagues acknowledge. "Nevertheless, our study showed that acupuncture was beneficial for women..., "the researchers write in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

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Treat The Pain Of Fibromyalgia Through Effective Alternative Therapies

Fibromyalgia is a peculiar chronic musculoskeletal disorder with indications of extensive and enduring muscle and soft tissue pain and swelling, exhaustion, and soreness in the neck, shoulders and hips. The name fibromyalgia comes from "fibro" meaning f1brous tissue (such as tendons and ligaments), "my" meaning muscles and "algia" meaning pain. The magnitude and ineffectiveness of conventional medicines has made the fibromyalgia patients turn to alternative therapies, which provide drug free doctoring, to relieve the pain.

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10 holistic pet care tips you can trust

For more than 22 years, I've been raising and caring for my pets using alternative and complementary methods. In that time, I've seen dozens of supplements, herbs and nutritional theories hailed as the one true way to pet health, and then fall by the wayside. After interviewing dozens of holistic vets, following a lot of tips that sounded promising and undergoing a great deal of trial and error with my own animals in the past two decades, I've come up with a list of 10 tried-and-true holistic tips that have worked for my pets as well as many others.

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A systematic review of the clinical effectiveness of acupuncture for allergic rhinitis

Allergies cause a considerable burden to both sufferers and the National Health Service. There is growing interest in acupuncture as a treatment for a range of conditions. Since acupuncture may modulate the immune system it could be a useful treatment for allergic rhinitis (AR) sufferers. We therefore assessed the evidence for the clinical effectiveness of acupuncture in patients with AR by performing a systematic review of the literature.

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