The Stones: An ancient rock-and-stroll story
Despite some recent challenges in both the U.S. and abroad to the efficacy of non-conventional (read: non-drug and non-surgical) healing techniques, support for these therapies remains strong on both sides of the Atlantic. I say "remains" strong because, after all, much of today's alternative medicine originated hundreds or thousands of years ago in various places around the globe.
After all, the roots of chiropractic care came from ancient Greece, yoga and Ayurveda arose in the India of antiquity, while Chinese stone age medicine gave us acupuncture. Ironic, isn't it, that so many of today's "new age" healing techniques which are widely thought to be nothing more than trends are actually older than the hills - some even pre-dating recorded history?
But I digress, sort of. I was speaking in a roundabout way of how the mainstream tends to look down its collective nose at any variety of medicine - no matter how widely used or sanctified by time and success - aside from what's been scientifically proven according to the dictates of the modern medical establishment (the same folks who green-lighted such winners as Vioxx, thalidomide, electrocution therapy and lobotomies!).
That's why it delights me to no end when someone actually bothers to study one of these tried-and-true healers that are dismissed by so many in mainstream medicine as fads or superstition - because more often than not, they're proven to be stunningly effective. And such is exactly the case with one ancient technique that's related to acupressure and therapeutic massage: Cobblestone-walking.
According to a recent Associated Press article, a team of researchers from the Oregon Research Institute executed a 16-week study in which 108 volunteers over 60 were divided into two groups: One group that would spend 3 sessions a week walking on cobblestones like the ones in traditional stone paths in China (walked on for centuries as a healing therapy), and the other spending an equal amount of time simply walking normally. At the end of the study, one of these groups showed measurable improvement in balance, mobility, and even BLOOD PRESSURE.
And guess what: It wasn't the garden-variety walkers.
Yep, the stone-strollers got all the benefits, just like the ancient Chinese have maintained forever and a day. WHY this group experienced multi-fold improvements in health is not clear, but it hardly seems important, unless you're a mainstream pointy-head who's trying to cram these benefits into a pill or something.
What IS important is that someone bothered to study one of these "alternative" therapies and publish the results (you can look them up yourself in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society), and that's a step in the right direction. Hopefully, it's the first of many to come in the near future.
And speaking of ancient healing and feet…
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Bugs beat drugs… again
It's been a while since I gave you an update about one of my favorite old-time healing techniques: Maggot Therapy.
Last May (Daily Dose, 5/11/04), I told you about how the use of live maggots to clean problem wounds saved 62.5% of subjects' limbs from amputation in one study. Then back on December 17th of last year, I told you about how the FDA - in one of its rare enlightened moments - granted its approval to maggot therapy.
And in the first case I've read about in the mainstream press since that decision, a 57-year-old Michigan woman who'd already lost her left leg to diabetes consented to maggot therapy to try and save her ulcerated, infected right foot. Despite her initial objections to the procedure (a common reaction), the therapy cleared the wound within 6 days after antibiotics and surgery had failed - saving the foot from amputation, according to an Associated Press report.
Though somewhat gross in the eyes of some patients, maggot therapy unquestionably works for stubborn wounds that drugs and surgery have failed to heal. And it has been saving lives and improving health for thousands of years…
Just like a lot of "unproven" treatments the medical mainstream shuns.
Living proof that the old way is sometimes still the best way,
William Campbell Douglass II, MD
