Depression is associated with cardiovascular disease via both lifestyle and physiological mechanisms. Depression makes one more likely to eat poorly, stop exercising, suffer sleep irregularities, etc.; and has been shown to elevate heart rate and blood pressure, reduce blood flow to the heart, and increase cortisol production.
New research suggests acupuncture use is associated with a lower risk of coronary heart disease (CHD; the most common form of cardiovascular disease) in depressed patients. The study by Chia-Yu Huang, et al. (for full text, click here), found that patients diagnosed with depression who received acupuncture experienced a significantly lower rate of CHD than depressed patients who did not receive acupuncture. These findings were independent of age, sex, comorbidities and medication use.
The study involved more than 43,000 patients, identified through the Taiwanese National Health Insurance Research Database, and divided into an acupuncture group and a non-acupuncture group for comparison based on a review of insurance claims records. TCM services are reimbursed through National Health Insurance, which covers more than 99 percent of the Taiwanese population, according to the study authors.
Both manual acupuncture and electroacupuncture use was identified via diagnostic codes in patient records (ICD-9-CM). Manual acupuncture was by far the most common treatment (88 percent of patients), with 3 percent receiving electroacupuncture and 9 percent receiving a combination of the two.
On average, patients received nearly nine acupuncture treatments apiece – with their first treatment more than three-and-a-half years after their depression diagnosis. Could earlier use of acupuncture save even more depressed patients from coronary heart disease?
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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