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Round-Up of Global News In Health and Complementary MedicineNews Beginning Wk 11 Sept 2000
Night Shift HealthAnyone who has ever had to work night shifts will know the fatiguing effect it can have on mind and body. The struggle to come to terms with working when outside all is dark can be highly disorientating. Now new research has shown that we might be affecting our bodies more than we ever imagined. Fiddling with our biological clocks really can make us sick not just in the short-term but in the long-term as well. Professor Russell Foster, head of the new Centre for Chronobiology at Imperial College, London announced at the recent British Association Science Festival that working at night is like trying to carry out your duties whilst under the influence of two and half pints of beer and five whiskies. At a cellular level, pushing cells in your body into action at a time when they would much prefer to be resting can leave them feeling drained. He gave the example of the ill-effects of eating in the middle of night, filling our stomach with food when naturally it would be on a go slow. The end result for many is bouts of gastro-enteritis. The problem with all this is of course there is no easy answer – our busy modern lives seem to dictate our biological clocks.
Herbal Medicines Having A RenaissanceDr John Wilkinson of Middlesex University predicts that herbal medicines could be the next big revolution in the health world. It is well-known amongst specialists in this field that herbal remedies are as a whole much more than the sum of their parts. This is in sharp contrast to traditional pharmaceutical products, in which there is usually only one actual active component. Extracts of herbs contain a cluster of these active substances – all of which work in concert to provide treatment of a specific disease or disorder. Dr Wilkinson likens this to listening to music. "You can listen to one note, or to chords. With one note all the time it becomes boring. Medicine is moving to the chords", he says. Dr Wilkinson is keen to win herbal medicine the respect he believes it much deserves. "We want to put serious science – fundamental pharmacology – into the development of herbal medicines." Certainly recent research is providing strong backing to herbal medicines vehement claims. St John’s Wort has now been shown to be as effective as certain prescription drugs in the treatment of mild to moderate depression, for instance. Such positive findings are only the start feels Dr Wilkinson – much more is yet to come.
Teenage Girls At Nutritional RiskGrowing concerns about health risks among teenage girls in the UK were heightened this week by a report from behavioural scientist Dr Andrew Hill. Examining their daily nutrition he discovered alarmingly that as many as one in five teenage girls fails to eat all the vital nutrients she needs to develop and grow healthily. The biggest factor in this trend is peer pressure to be slim. The great influence of this pressure is Western society’s narrow definition of what is beautiful – an influence strengthened by media presentation of waif-like females. Astonishingly girls as young as twelve are now discussing the need to weight manage, with the result that they begin to cut down on what they eat. This ill-conceived dieting is having dire consequences on their nutritional status: over 12 per cent our now believed to be deficient in vitamin A for instance. This malnourishement has ramifications when you take into account the numbers of teenage pregnancies. Teenage mothers-to-be continue to eat poorly even throughout their pregnancy, increasing dramatically the risk of underweight or sickly premature babies. Not only our these teenagers often psychologically unprepared for pregnancy they are also now more likely to be nutritionally unprepared as well.
Homeopathy Really Digs For Allergy SufferersHomeopathy received a big thumbs up this week. Latest research has shown that is highly effective in the treatment of allergies. The research was carried out by a team of doctors in Ayr, Scotland and it results are pretty conclusive. During a speech at the British Pharmaceutical Conference, one of the research team, Dr Neil Beattie, provided excellence evidence of the dramatic difference homeopathy can have for allergy sufferers. He showed a number of "before and after" photographs of one of the treated patients, a woman suffered from severe asthma attacks because of an allergy to dogs – a disorder which was so disabling that she was unable to visit her daughter who owned to retrievers. Dr Beattie, a senior general practitioner in Ayr, Scotland, showed a picture of the woman smiling with two dogs. A final photograph showed the same patient relaxing with the dogs quite unaffected. During the research three kinds of homeopathic preparation were tested and compared with a placebo. Patients with a wide range of allergic disorders - including asthma, eczema and hay fever - took the medicine twice a day for a period of four weeks. The results were little short of amazing: 43 per cent appeared to be totally cured by the homeopathic treatment.
Treatment Of Prostate Cancer Gains Boost From Herbal MedicineProstate cancer remains one of the biggest killers amongst UK men over the age of 50. However, now doctors may have a further weapon in their armoury for curing this disease – at least according to the results of early research into a herbal medicine preparation. So-called PC-SPES is a combination of a number of herbs including isatis, liquorice, lucid ganoderma, pseudo-ginseng, rubescens, saw palmetto and scute. PC-SPES has been sold for some time in high street health stores but only now have the claims for its effectiveness been put to the test under formal medical trial conditions. A team led by Dr Jan Geliebter at New York Medical College carried out the groundbreaking study. Part of their research involved examining the effect of PC-SPES on the levels of the protein prostate-specific antigen (PSA). PSA is used as an indicator of prostatic cancer – high levels are usually seen in patients suffering from this condition. The researchers found that PC-SPES quickly reduced levels of PSA in their cancer patients, possibly showing that the herbal medicine was fighting the tumour and winning. Dr Geliebter remains cautious about these results at this early stage, acknowledging that much more research is required. However, he believes PC-SPES has much promise and could be a vital treatment in the management of prostate cancer.
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