Category: Alternative Medicine

Who says hypothermia is bad? Well, its actually bad but some doctors in Boston are using hypothermia to buy more time to conduct much needed surgeries to trauma patients.

A new medical technique which chills the body of a trauma patient thus giving more time to doctors to conduct a surgical operation is now being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and the Harvard Medical School.

According to researchers, inducing extreme hypothermia to the patient’s body to shut it down during the operation adds to the patient’s chance of survival. The procedure also includes connecting a pump to the major blood vessels surrounding the heart to remove the warm blood and replace it with cold saline solution. This cools the patient’s body to as low as 10 degrees Celsius.

Continue reading “Extreme Hypothermia in Trauma Surgery: Dr. Hasa Alam & Co.”

Genetic audit uncovers hidden ingredients of Chinese medicine. DNA sequencing tests on 15 popular traditional Chinese medicines seized by Australian border officials reveals a variety of potential toxins, allergens — and even traces of endangered animals.

For desperate people suffering from diseases that are debilitating or still incurable, traditional Chinese medicines are often the “courts of last resort.” Hundreds of thousands of people afflicted with cancers, spinal cord injuries, Lou Gehrig’s disease, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, HIV/AIDS and other diseases turn to these medicines to ease pain or improve the quality of life.

And it’s no wonder, as traditional Chinese medicine (TCMs) have been used for 3,000 years and are an integral part of Chinese culture. In recent decades, the practice has spread across the world and gained popularity, spawning a multimillion-dollar global industry.

Continue reading “Hidden Ingredients of Chinese Medicine: Are They Safe?”

LSD Treatment for Alcohol Abuse: Krebs-Johansen Study. You may not have noticed it, but there’s an ongoing ‘renaissance’ of research interest in the use of powerful hallucinogens to treat intractable addictions and other psychiatric disorders.

In the 1950s, psychiatrists began to promote using psychedelics by to treat schizophrenia and other conditions, and research into the medical uses of these psychoactive drugs began to take off. But funders pulled the plug on research, following political pressures that came with the advent of the War on Drugs in the United States during the Nixon administration and the ensuing spread of its dogma of prohibition to the rest of the world.

But in the last decade or so, a new generation of researchers cropped up, interested in harnessing the therapeutic benefits of now illegal, but powerful, mindbenders. A few of the new experiments that have met some success in the treatment of drug, tobacco and alcohol dependency are for: ecstasy, known chemically as 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, the ayahuasca vine from the Amazon for drug and alcohol dependency, and even psilocybin — the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms — for smoking cessation.

Continue reading “LSD Treatment for Alcohol Abuse: Krebs-Johansen Study”

Sweden approves medical ‘marijuana’. Following the lead of drug regulators in Germany, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Spain and four other European countries, Sweden’s Medical Products Agency (Läkemedelsverket) approved a cannabis-based mouth spray for the treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) on Feb. 12.

Apart from the eight European countries, the cannabis spray is also available in Canada (since 2005) and New Zealand, where it’s been approved for relieving pain and muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis.

Continue reading “Medical Marijuana for Multiple Sclerosis Patients”