According to the World Health Organization’s first global report on sepsis (2020), “When sepsis is not recognized early and managed promptly, it can lead to septic shock, multiple organ failure and death. … Even sepsis survivors are not out of danger: only half will completely recover, the rest will either die within 1 year or be burdened by long-term disabilities.” Ironically, infections acquired in health care settings (hospitals, intensive-care units, etc.) are a common cause of this life-threatening complication.
A new multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial has found that a TCM herbal injection is effective at reducing sepsis-related mortality. Researchers compared Xuebijing injection vs. placebo among 1,817 patients (ages 18-75 years) at 45 intensive-care units across China. In all patients, sepsis was present for less than 48 hours at time of intervention.
Exclusion criteria when selecting patients for this study included sepsis for longer than 48 hours; lack of informed consent; severe primary disease including liver / kidney dysfunction; pregnant or breastfeeding; use of an immunosuppressant or organ transplant within previous six months; and participation in other clinical trials in previous 30 days.
Patients received intravenous infusion of either Xuebijing (100 mg mixed with 100 mg saline) or saline placebo (200 mg) every 12 hours for five days. Findings, published in JAMA Internal Medicine,1 showed that the 28-day morality rate was significantly lower in patients receiving Xuebijing compared to placebo (18.8% vs. 26.1%).
The study authors do not state the herbal ingredients in Xuebijing as used in the injection; however, it is generally known to consist of five primary herbs: chi shao, chuan xiong, dan shen, hong hua, and dang gui. The researchers also note that the herbal injection has been licensed and utilized in China for the treatment of sepsis and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome since 2004, raising the obvious question: When will other countries recognize its value?
References
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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