Category Archives: Alternative Medicine

As new cases of coronavirus mount in the Ohio Valley, health officials are bracing for an onslaught of patients and what could be unprecedented demand for beds, medical staff and specialized equipment.

Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia have disproportionately high rates of people vulnerable to serious illness from COVID-19. But the regions capacity to treat them has been sharply reduced by the closure of some 21 hospitals over the past 15 years. An analysis by the Ohio Valley ReSource shows some of the communities where hospitals have closed have some of the nations poorest health outcomes, making them especially vulnerable.

Still more hospitals in the region are being closed now, even as the pandemic unfolds.

Click to hear Liam's story about how Ohio Valley health care systems are handling the coronavirus pandemic.

Tiffany Wilburn-Meeks has lived in eastern Kentucky's Greenup County for most of her 38 years. And the hospital her family has always relied on is only a five-minute drive away.

Our Lady of Bellefonte Hospital is where she would go if she was sick growing up, and its where she was considering taking her 23-month-old daughter Darian for speech therapy. Its also where her mom, Judy, would go if an asthma attack turned for the worst.

But I think if she'd had to go to Kings Daughters [Hospital], I don't know that she would have survived the drive because it's 10 or 15 more minutes down the road.

But by May, her family wont be able to rely on Our Lady of Bellefonte anymore. The 220-bed hospital with more than 1,000 employees started by a congregation of Catholic sisters in 1953 with the blessing of the pope via telegram will close its doors.

That would leave 35,000 people in Greenup County without a hospital, forcing those who need intensive medical care to drive to Kings Daughters Hospital in Ashland. This comes as many Ohio Valley public health officials are bracing for the coronavirus to reach their communities.

While the number of confirmed cases in her region have not reached levels in larger cities, she knows the number will grow.

If it does, there's no way that Kings Daughters is going to be able to handle that, she said. It is terrifying, and I'm afraid that people will die as a consequence of the hospital closing.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Kings Daughters Hospital said they were working daily with Our Lady of Bellefonte to potentially expand the capacity of Kings Daughters if patient needs surge due to coronavirus.

Wilburn-Meek started an online petition to try to call attention to the situation and save the hospital, but she isnt optimistic shell be successful. And more than a dozen communities across the Ohio Valley are facing a similar situation.

Our Lady of Bellefonte will join at least 21 other hospital closures in the Ohio Valley within the past 15 years. The Ohio Valley Resource estimates those 21 closures represented more than 1,000 hospital beds in total.

Some shuttered hospital sites are now vacant parking lots. Some have been turned into addiction rehab facilities or urgent care facilities, but those often have limited or no in-patient services.

These closures have left a hollowed out healthcare infrastructure in the Ohio Valley, and leading healthcare professionals worry that the loss of hospital beds, skilled staff and equipment combined with a population that is especially vulnerable to COVID-19 disease could hinder how well the region can respond to the coronavirus.

Running Out

For 15 years, Marlene Moore was lead nurse of the intensive care unit at Ohio Valley Medical Center in downtown Wheeling, West Virginia. She would make determinations about who would be admitted and who would be discharged, who would be transferred to other departments and hospitals, and helping younger nurses with questions and assistance.

That time came to an end when the company that owned OVMC and another hospital in nearby Martins Ferry, Ohio, announced last year both hospitals would close. Along with Belmont Community Hospital also closing, three hospitals in total last year shuttered in the Wheeling metropolitan area.

It was just devastating, because especially at our smaller hospitals, the employees know everybody. I mean, from housekeeping, to dietary to the lab, to all the departments, Moore said. It affected the whole valley.

Moore started working last month at what is now the only hospital in town, Wheeling Hospital, where a coronavirus patient is currently being treated.

She said because Wheeling Hospital often has many beds filled with patients having other needs, those needing a bed for coronavirus treatment may have to travel a half-hour or more to hospitals in Steubenville, Ohio, Columbus or Pittsburgh.

And its the kind of people her hospital tends to serve that has her particularly worried.

We have such an older population here. And if you get several that come in at the same time with severe respiratory distress, you're going to run out of ICU beds, you're going to run out of ventilators, you're actually going to run out of places to treat these people, she said.

A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found West Virginia led the nation in how vulnerable its population is to coronavirus because of old age and preexisting conditions. More than half of all adults in West Virginia and more than 45% of all adults in Kentucky were at high risk of serious illness from coronavirus because of advanced age, pre-existing conditions, or both.

A report from Kaiser Health News also found there are only 325 ICU beds for more than 12,000 people over the age of 60 in Ohio County, where Wheeling is located. People over the age of 60 make up 28% of the countys population.

According to an Ohio Valley Resource data analysis, 4 of the 18 counties that lost hospitals over the past 15 years also have some of the worst health outcomes in the nation. Those counties have some of the countrys highest rates of chronic respiratory disease deaths, cardiovascular disease deaths and diabetes prevalence.

Amid closures, remaining Ohio Valley hospitals are reinforcing their capacity for beds, equipment and personal protective equipment for worst case scenarios.

A statement from the West Virginia Hospital Association said hospitals are canceling or rescheduling elective surgeries to free up more beds, in compliance with a state emergency order. Hospitals are converting different departments into infectious disease units, and developing alternative treatment sites. One hospital in Athens, Ohio, has now set up a triage tent to treat potential patients outside.

Rising Costs

Even if Ohio Valley hospitals are able to accommodate a surge of coronavirus patients, the financial toll it could take could devastate rural healthcare providers.

A report last year from Navigant Consulting showed that 16 rural hospitals in Kentucky about a quarter of all rural hospitals in the state were at high risk of closing due to unstable financial situations. Some of the reasons cited for financial struggles include population loss with fewer people to serve, and more patients insured through Medicare and Medicaid, which often undercompensates hospitals for treatment.

Those ongoing challenges will only be made worse by the pandemic.

The payment mechanism for treating these patients is not clear at this point. The unusually long length of stay I think is a concern with the very sick of these patients who typically end up, or have ended up, on ventilator care, which is very expensive and resource intensive to deliver, said Bud Warman, Kentucky Hospital Association Vice President and former CEO of Highlands Regional Medical Center in east Kentucky. They haven't always had potentially this much volume of wants to deal with.

The American Hospital Association is asking for $100 billion from Congress to offset anticipated coronavirus costs, while some rural hospitals struggle to ration protective medical supplies. A bill being considered by the Kentucky Senate would also provide a loan program for struggling rural hospitals.

Warman also said when hospitals have closed in Appalachia, there are often few options remaining for the people the provider served.

In some cases, they just don't have adequate transportation to get them that longer distance, Warman said. If they're deciding between food on the table or traveling 50 miles to see a doctor or to seek health care, oftentimes, they make the choice for food on the table. It sounds dire, but the fact is in many parts of our state, many parts of Appalachia, that is the case.

Whats Left

In central West Virginia, Michael Brumage is leading one of the remaining options for those without easy access to a hospital.

As Chief Medical Officer of Cabin Creek Health Systems, he directs several Federally Qualified Health Centers that provide preventative care and substance abuse treatment, often for people who are low-income or uninsured. His experience also extends across multiple organizations: Brumage serves as director of the Preventative Medicine Residency Program in the WVU School of Public Health, was former executive director of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, and former health officer for Kanawha County and Putnam County, West Virginia.

His staff is preparing to treat patients who have respiratory symptoms outside of the centers in order to prevent the spread of the virus inside their buildings, and theyll also have curbside service for those with respiratory symptoms.

Our public health system has been underfunded for many, many years, at the federal, state and local levels, Brumage said. So we're fortunate, I think that there are federally qualified health centers, that there are free and charitable clinics that are able to pick up the slack.

But even with his centers, there are still intensive, in-patient services that he cant provide, that a hollowed out healthcare infrastructure has left lacking.

Brumage was born in Fairmont Regional Medical Center in Fairmont, West Virginia. So was his sister. Hes had several relatives whove been hospitalized there over the years. The hospital is set to close this week.

It's befuddling to me how they can close this hospital during a pandemic, when there are going to be so many more beds that need to be filled. It staggers the imagination, Brumage said.

While a hospital is being built to replace Fairmont Regional, Brumage is worried that it will be too late for the demand for hospital beds, ventilators and skilled staff needed to respond to the pandemic.

There will be many competing economic priorities once this clears to restore the American economy, Brumage said. But shame on us if we don't invest in our public health infrastructure, and if we don't invest in our overall health infrastructure, and if we don't look for ways to make health care equitable for all Americans.

Original post:

Ohio Valley Facing Pandemic With A Health System Hollowed Out By Hospital Closures - WKU Public Radio

Written by Prabha Raghavan, Rahul V Pisharody | Hyderabad, New Delhi | Published: April 1, 2020 3:03:19 am The shortage of manpower, coupled with an ongoing fear of disciplinary action by law enforcement authorities, means that stocks of medicines have been slow to reach retail outlets despite them being considered essential. (File Photo)

Nearly a week after the 21-day nationwide lockdown was announced to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-COV-2), India is still facing hiccups in ensuring adequate and timely supplies of medicines. The shortage of manpower, coupled with an ongoing fear of disciplinary action by law enforcement authorities, means that stocks of medicines have been slow to reach retail outlets despite them being considered essential.

For instance, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine medicines like Ipca Laboratories HCQS and Lariago are still stocked out in several pharmacies in Delhi.

Hydroxychloroquine, especially, is used by several patients with auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, according to Fortis Memorial Research Institute rheumatology consultant Dr Naval Mendiratta.

Further, stocks of blood pressure medicines, insulin and other medicines to treat diabetes have stopped making their way to distributors, said All India Chemists and Distributors Fedration president Kailash Gupta.

The All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists (AIOCD), too, on March 29 wrote to various pharmaceutical associations to support and ensure adequate stocks of medicines at their depots and to coordinate transportation to chemists and druggists.

At present, it is reported from all states that stock level is going down and may last for the next 15-20 days. Therefore, we request you to please look into the issue and ensure that sufficient stock is maintained at your stock points, stated AIOCD president JS Shinde and general secretary Rajiv Singhal in the letter.

Meanwhile, a large number of medical stores in and around Hyderabad enlisted in the essential establishments during the lockdown have downed their shutters. If a disruption in supply leading to a shortage in stock is one reason, the absence of workers from attending to their duties is another.

According to Kishan Murary Shetty, general secretary of the Greater Hyderabad Retail Medical Shops Association, around 60 per cent of medical stores in the city are shut as of today.

Employees are unable to come to work. Most of them depend on public transport and are unable to reach for work. Others who own vehicles are being stopped at police checkpoints and despite showing ID cards they are not being allowed to go, he said.

Heres a quick Coronavirus guide from Express Explained to keep you updated: What can cause a COVID-19 patient to relapse after recovery? | COVID-19 lockdown has cleaned up the air, but this may not be good news. Heres why | Can alternative medicine work against the coronavirus? | A five-minute test for COVID-19 has been readied, India may get it too | How India is building up defence during lockdown | Why only a fraction of those with coronavirus suffer acutely | How do healthcare workers protect themselves from getting infected? | What does it take to set up isolation wards?

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A week into lockdown: Disruption in supply of essential medicines, dearth of staff at drug stores - The Indian Express

Two men were on a mission in a bullockcart. Covering the hilly terrain was not easy in the mid-1930s when roads were few. Moving from village to village and walking through paddy fields and slush in the rural area of Kadakkal, now in Kollam district, nearly 50 km from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, were Dr Sankaran Govindan and his compounder Padmanabhan Pillai. Over three years they injected more than 12,500 patients with medicine, to cure them of the tropical bacterial infection yaws that was mutilating and crippling people.

As doctors and health workers battle COVID-19 the world over, Dr G Krishnakumar rewinds to an era when his father worked hard to cure the people of Kadakkal from yaws, an infection affecting the skin, bones, and joints, that was endemic in the hilly areas of the princely state of esrtwhile Travancore, on Indias south-west coast.

Dr Govindan, then a young doctor in his thirties whod graduated from Madras Medical College, took up his first posting as medical officer in 1935-36 at a government dispensary in Kadakkal. His father Shangu Vaidyan was the Kottaram Vaidyan (palace physician) and he sent his son for higher education to what was then Madras.

Allopathy was still an unknown system of treatment in rural Kadakkal, but the young doctors work, attitude, and sincerity gradually brought him patients. In the predominantly agrarian area, inhabited by marginal farmers and tribes people in the hills, Dr Govindan noticed a lesion that occurred in many people of different age groups, especially among those who lived in close quarters. He identified it as yaws that is closely related to the bacterium that causes syphilis, though it is not transmitted through sexual intercourse. It spreads through direct contact with infected wounds, instead.

What causes Yaws

My father began documenting the illness and its treatment in an album-cum-journal that he meticulously maintained in 1936, Dr Krishnakumar says, gently turning the pages of two albums, crumbling with age, and speaking of an era before the arrival of antibiotics, when doctors and compounders worked hand in hand to make medicines.

A jotting in the journal, supplemented with photographs, explains his findings and the progression of the disease. He noted that the primary lesion often occurs at the site of an existing ulcer or bruise, does not respond to any local treatment, and persists for years. Children were susceptible to yaws, perhaps because of their tender skin and poor health.

Dr Govindan found that healthy children with primary or secondary manifestations were able to withstand the disease but at any point of time when their immunity was compromised, they would fall prey to it. The secondary manifestations sometimes appear after a period of years. The ulcerating condition is more prolonged and extremely destructive. It makes the patient a cripple. Bow legs are one of the characteristic features of Yaws, he wrote.

In those days yaws was considered incurable. Dr Govindan found that Neo-Salvarsan, a drug made in Germany was found to be effective in curing the disease. But he understood that this would be too costly to treat a large group of people, especially those he treated, who were mostly underprivileged.

That is when he read about an alternative treatment for yaws and found out that compounds of bismuth had been used in the treatment of syphilis since 1921. Immediately, he contacted his friend Narayanan Potti, then head of the department of chemistry at University College in the Thiruvananthapura, says Dr Krishnakumar.

Professor Potti managed to synthesise and purify the sodium bismuth salt of tartaric acid for him in quantities sufficient for mass use. He called it Bisota. Dr Govindan and his assistants travelled from village to village injected one dose into each of those afflicted by yaws. As a result of their tireless work, yaws was eradicated from Kadakkal and the surrounding areas, says a historical article published in The Journal of the Association of Physicians India that Dr Krishnakumar wrote.

My father had told me about this when I was a child. Now, these albums are all that remains of that momentous journey. Once the Trivandrum Medical College came up in Thiruvananthpuram, he was appointed in the department of surgery. After his retirement in 1962 as Professor of surgery in Kozhikode Medical College, he established Govidans Hospital in 1966, says Krishnakumar.

He adds that as long as his father was practising, patients used to come from Kadakkal for treatment. Today, Kadakkal is a town and not many remember the work of its first doctor.

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The man from Kerala who cured yaws in the 1930s - The Hindu

As there is no vaccine till now and in the absence of a scientifically proven cure or preventive for novel coronavirus infection, should one use alternative medicine?

One must be going through many forwarded WhatsApp messages that suggests Homeopathy is the antidote or there are multiple advisories from the AYUSH Ministry on coronavirus. Its long list of recommendations includes Unani concoctions Sharbat Unnab and Tiryaq Arba, and the homeopathic medicine Arsenicum Album 30 for post-exposure prophylaxis for doctors and caregivers.

Coronavirus Pandemic: Two young siblings tested positive in Srinagar

On all of this, here is what World Health Organization has to say: While some western, traditional or home remedies may provide comfort and alleviate symptoms of COVID-19, there is no evidence that current medicine can prevent or cure the disease. WHO does not recommend self-medication with any medicines, including antibiotics, as a prevention or cure for COVID-19. However, there are several ongoing clinical trials that include both western and traditional medicines.

Doctors are discouraging the use of drugs recommended by practitioners of alternative medicine because a drug has to be developed keeping in mind its safety and efficacy.

More here:

Is there any alternative medicine against the novel coronavirus? - Newsd.in

Culture Spotlight

Former Health Secretary Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan says that you can protect your body from COVID-19 by simply doing intentional pressing. BY BARBARA MAE DACANAY

Boosting ones immune system, one of the main recommendations against COVID-19, remain a chief concern on everyones minds. While many take vitamins and supplements for this, there are those that are turning to more alternative means.

Take Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, a former Department of Health Secretary who promotes natural preventive measures in the fight against coronavirus, advocates for one method particularlyacupuncture. The doctor is one of the countrys pioneering acupuncturists, which he started in 1979.

Galvez Tans interest in acupuncture began in the mid-70s, when he took seriously his mission to be a barriodoctor nationwide. Thetough job included crafting community health programs, and training health workers to combat tuberculosis and other diseases aided by Church-based groups, local and international non-government organizations. He made a vow to look after thehealth care of poor people and not leave the Philippines for greener pastures. He spent two months in medical missions in Palawan in 1968 while he was still 20-year-old student at the University of the Philippines (where he finished medicine in 1974). I was born with this desire to helpothers. There is an inner voice that constantly gives meencouragement that this is the way to live life to the fullest, hesays.

"When my wife Rebeccaand I prepared to transfer from Manila to Mindanao for outreach missions, she began studying acupuncture under Dr. Benjamin Aquino and Dr. Liu, a graduate of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Sheintroduced me to acupuncture, Galvez Tan shares. "Ieventually studied acupuncture under Dr. Aquino after our intermittent missions to the Cordillera in Negros.

At the time, acupuncture was useful for themarginalizedbecauseonly five percent of 85 million members of Philhealth could avail of hospitalization and western medicine, Galvez Tan says.Acupuncture was legislated as acceptable medical practice in hospitals after 22 yearswhen President Fidel Ramos signed the Traditional and Alternative Medicine Act (or TAMA, also known as Republic Act 8423) in 1997. It also establishedthePhilippine Institute of Traditional and Alternative Health Care (PITAHC), a government agency in charge of training, regulating, and accreditingacupuncturists, including otheratypicalhealthpractitioners.

The law was sponsored by the late Senator Juan Flavier whose passion was todevelop herbal medicine in the country. Galvez Tan headedthealternative medicine program of the health department in 1992, andsucceeded Flavier in 1995, when the latter ran for the senate.

Flavier sent government doctors to study acupuncture in China from 1992 to 1995.Iofficially went to Beijing to sign an agreement between China and the Philippines to continue thetraining in acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) foranother five years (until 2000), Galvez Tan says.Later on, private and government hospitals did not encourage the use of acupuncture because the training program stopped after 2000. The best trained Filipino acupuncturists are growing older, the doctor laments.

To attain a mega immune system that can aggressively defeat COVID 19, Galvez Tansuggests self-massage sessions with intentional pressing on two major points:

Large Intestine 11 (LI 11, Quichi in Chinese, and Pool at the Bend in English), found at the lateral (or dorsal) space near the elbow, between the forearm and the lower hand; and Spleen 6 (SP 6, San Yin Jiao in Chinese, and Three Yin Intersection in English), measured four fingers up to the highest point of the ankle.

There are two importantact-pressure points that can strengthen the lungs and make it fight orwithstand pneumonia, a complication triggered by COVID 19.TheyincludeLung 5 (LU 5, Chiza in Chinese, and Cubit Marsh in English),located at the upper-central part of the lower arm;and Large Intestine 4 (LI 4, Hegu in Chinese, and Joining Valley in English), found between the thumb and the index finger (pointer).

Pericardium 6 (P 6, Nei Guan in Chinese, and Pool at the Bend in English), located four-fingers up the ankle, is an anti-panic pressure point: ithas a calming effect, which is needed for healing, says Galvez Tan.

Read the original here:

Strengthen your lungs, relax, and boost your immunity by working on these pressure points - ABS-CBN News

Written by Amitabh Sinha | Pune | Updated: April 1, 2020 7:44:10 am An official takes the temperature of migrants entering a shelter home in Lucknow. (Express photo by Vishal Srivastav)

The emergence of human clusters in which several people together have been found to be infected with coronavirus is likely to significantly alter the nature of spread of the disease in the country. While the number of infected persons has increased much faster in the last three days than at any other time since the outbreak, experts believe that from the perspective of containing the spread, the emergence of these clusters might be a good thing.

The number of positive cases in the country has more than doubled in the last five days, from just under 700 on March 26 to over 1400 today. Many of the new infected cases are concentrated in large groups, like in those linked to a religious meeting of Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi. Such clusters, not all of them linked to the Tablighi Jamaat, have emerged in Meerut, Sangli, Ahmednagar, Delhi and Telangana.

Besides the fact that the source of transmission in most of these cases can reliably be traced, experts say such concentrated cases could also be easier for the health authorities to handle compared to isolated cases dispersed in population, in terms of isolating them and preventing further spread from them.

The emerging news that nearly 100 cases in India could be traced back to people who attended a gathering in Delhi further strengthens the possibility that until so far, in almost all cases, the infection is traced back to a person coming from overseas. Such clustering of infections suggests that there is no community transmission, said L S Shashidhara, a professor of biology at Ashoka University.

Scientists should analyse the dynamics of infection in all clustered groups across India to understand how geo-climatic conditions and pre-medical history would influence the spread. A major caveat, however, is the absence of data on asymptomatic positive cases as we have not tested them at all, he said.

Gautam Menon, a professor of computational biology at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, agreed with the contention that clusters could be easier to handle, but said that there were many other cases, outside of these clusters, that looked like very good evidence of community transmission.

It is no doubt easier to track and isolate a large group of infected people in one place. But we are also seeing an increasing number of isolated cases now where the original point of transmission is not known, or is unclear. This is pointing towards what many of us have been saying for long, that community transmission is a reality and we cannot escape from that, he said.

The government has already declared some of the locations where these clusters have emerged as hot spots, and has said that it will increase surveillance and testing of samples at these places.

Heres a quick Coronavirus guide from Express Explained to keep you updated: What can cause a COVID-19 patient to relapse after recovery? | COVID-19 lockdown has cleaned up the air, but this may not be good news. Heres why | Can alternative medicine work against the coronavirus? | A five-minute test for COVID-19 has been readied, India may get it too | How India is building up defence during lockdown | Why only a fraction of those with coronavirus suffer acutely | How do healthcare workers protect themselves from getting infected? | What does it take to set up isolation wards?

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Coronavirus: Clusters lead to surge in spread but could help contain it too - The Indian Express

Before you reach inside your medicine cabinet, consider the most powerful healing tool is your own body. That is the philosophy certified reiki practitioner Korinne McManus follows.

Her practice, Amethyst Reiki and Healing, located on Roxbury Street in the Miller Forge building, is the result of her answering her calling to educate people about this form of alternative medicine with roots in 19th century Japan.

A reiki practitioner channels universal life force energy (known as qi) and transfers it through the palms to the patient to promote physical or emotional healing. During a session with a client, McManus uses light hands-on touch to assist with activating the bodys natural healing process, often incorporating essential oils.

Her interest in the modality began 20 years ago when she received her own first reiki session.

In that moment, I realized how loudly our bodies speak, she said, adding that a reiki session is an opportunity to talk to the body. I started to learn who I was as a person, and I committed to my own reiki practice.

In 2012, McManus reiki practice became a medical intervention after she was diagnosed with cancer.

It allowed me to continuously connect with my body, she said. I believe reiki and other healing modalities I utilized have kept me cancer-free.

Reiki became even more deeply important to McManus when she was seriously injured two years later in a motor vehicle accident and in recovery for several months after.

Through my healing journey over 15 to 20 years, seeing how (reiki) healed my deep roots whether spiritual, emotional or medical I knew I had to share it and empower others to look at themselves as an ultimate healing tool rather than relying on pharmaceuticals, she said. Reiki is just one tool to ultimately figure out the root cause of what youre experiencing.

Once McManus was healed from her injuries, she enrolled in her first reiki certification training. She opened her Keene practice in 2018.

While her clientele greatly varies, she said, her specialty is working with people who have issues with addiction and mental health, as well as those with developmental disabilities. Her full-time job is working in the mental health field, which she has done for the past 20 years. In addition to her private practice, she also offers reiki services at a recovery center in Vermont.

I have a personal addiction connection with family members. Its my mission to reach out to those in recovery to say, Lets give you another tool to have in your toolbox, she said. Its important for people to have opportunities and experience different [types of] alternative care.

For that reason, McManus offers a discounted rate for her services to those in recovery.

My goal is to knock down any barriers to accessing alternative care, she said. I dont do what I do to make money. I have a full-time job. If someone couldnt afford to pay full-price, I want them to reach out and have a conversation with me.

A reiki session with McManus starts with just that, in fact: a conversation.

When someone reaches out to me [for an appointment], I always ask if they have ever had reiki before and I ask them if there is anything theyd like to work on, she said. Sometimes the answer is no and they just want to come in and relax. But I do revisit the original conversation once they come in.

At the beginning of her session, she does what she calls a body scan.

I pay attention to how [the clients] energy feels if theres a shift in temperature and I work my way down the body and back up, McManus said. When your qi is low, [thats] when we start to see illness and disease.

Some areas of the body require light hands-on touch to heal. For others, McManus will hover over with her hands, depending upon what energy she is picking up in the body and the level of support she feels is needed. With the goal of ultimate relaxation, clients wear a lavender-scented eye pillow during the session and listen to soft background music.

After the first session to assess the client, McManus creates an individualized plan.

It varies, she said. If the client is experiencing high anxiety, I may request to see them once a week. If someone just needs time to de-stress, it might be once a month.

Another way she breaks down barriers is by offering home visit healing sessions for those physically unable to see her at her office or for those whose social anxiety prevents them from doing so.

In addition to reiki services, McManus offers reiki with guided meditation, crystal and chakra healing and breath work, as well as intuitive reiki, during which she will connect with spirit.

If someone is open to those messages [from spirit], I offer them, she said.

McManus also facilitates a monthly womens sacred circle, during which other alternative healing practitioners will offer their wisdom.

Its a nice mix of women who attend, she said. Its been really eye-opening. Your story is no different than my story its important for us to understand that. Every circle, I leave feeling just so connected and proud to be doing what I do, offering that space for women to come and release whats heavy on their heart.

McManus hope is to offer another womens sacred circle in Brattleboro, where she is also planning to expand her services. She always talks to her clients about additional alternative healing therapies and how they can complement each other in the path to overall wellness whether its acupuncture, massage aromatherapy or the many others on this list.

Its about moving energy within the body, she said. The most important thing you can do when finding out what healing modality works for you is by simply listening to your body. When someone gets on my table, they get the chance to slow down, connect with and honor themselves.

Amethyst Reiki and Healing is located at 103 Roxbury St., Suite 103 in Keene. For more information, call (603) 762-1135 or visit Facebook: m.me/amethystreikiandhealing.

Read more here:

Keene Reiki Practitioner Offers Alternative Healing Tools - The Keene Sentinel

While it may seem silly today, when Hippocrates defined the four humorsblood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegmthe Greek physician of the fourth century B.C. built on the best science (or natural philosophy) available, systematized in the idiom of the day's most cutting edge technology: hydraulics.

In The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee describes the Greeks preoccupation with fluid mechanics, spurred by a "revolution" in irrigation and "culminating with Archaemedes discovering his eponymous laws in his bathtub."

"This preoccupation with hydraulics also flowed into Greek medicine and pathology. To explain illnessall illnessHippocrates fashioned an elaborate doctrine based on fluids and volumes, which he freely applied to pneumonia, boils, dysentery, and hemorrhoids," Mukherjee writes. "In the normal body, these four fluids were held in perfect, if somewhat precarious, balance. In illness, this balance was upset by the excess of one fluid."

His point is simple: how we name and describe disease, and the idiom in which we understand them, affect how the disease is understood and how its sufferers are treated. While the advent of the germ theory of disease has advanced our understanding and our ability to treat diseases, we are not always more rational in how we choose, as individuals, to respond. We have better information, which can lead researchers to vaccines instead of new methods of bloodletting, but our perspectives are still colored by culture and how we interpret our place in the world.

One beneficial expression of this can be seen in how we react to the novel coronavirus, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic spreading through 157 countries. Rather than the Greek's pursuit of internal balance, inspired by hydraulics, we think of the coronavirus in ways appropriate for the social media age. Using terms like "social distancing" and "self-quarantine," our reaction to COVID-19 is defined in relation to a connected humanity, where the best way to address a disease is to retract from the social network that spreads COVID-19.

This is, without a doubt, an improvement on the past. But just because we have made advances in science, doesn't mean we aren't prone to some of the same superstitions and modes of thinking that accompanied earlier plagues and pandemics.

With their dark, heavy robes and beaked masks, the plague doctor will forever be associated with the bubonic plague, even though they first appeared in France and Italy in the 1600s, nearly 300 years after the Black Death ripped through Europe and killed up to 60 percent of the continent's people. But while the plague doctor has become an eerie symbol of pandemic death, there's much about the outlandish costume that's more practical than you might think.

Invented by Charles de l'Orme, chief physician to three French kings and friend to the infamous Cardinal Richelieu, the plague doctor outfit included heavy gloves and clothing designed to keep people at a distance and prevent skin-to-skin contact. Plague doctors would use a staff to point out buboes and other indications of plague on patients, without touching.

While the state of medicine in the 1600sa century that saw a resurgence in bubonic plague epidemics throughout Europedoesn't map well on to modern debates about public vs. privately funded health care, the plague doctor was hired directly by towns and offered a vital public service to all rungs of society (though many became infamous for extracting additional fees). Not only did they treat the sick, but plague doctors also maintained public records, witness wills, conducted autopsies and dispensed medical advice. Some of the most respected medical minds of the era were plague doctors, including the Swiss physician Paracelsus and, strangely enough, Nostradamus, who advised against the bloodletting commonly used to treat the plague (he instead prescribed a lozenge of rosehips).

But even if they may have engaged in the best medical practices of their day, we now associate the plague doctor more with death than healing. The mask, with its skull-like visage, certainly doesn't help. But stuffed with strong-smelling substancesambergris, mint, rose petalsthe plague doctor's mask actually embodies both practical and erroneous responses to the spreading pandemic. While it undoubtedly helped ward off the smell from dead and diseased bodies, the masks were based on an outdated miasma theory of disease, which held that the plague was spread by foul odors and bad air.

We have better masks today. N95 respirators and surgical masks are worn by medical professionals treating people infected with the coronavirus. The respirators protect the wearer from inhaling the aerosolized/airborne virus. Surgical facemasks are less effective, providing only what the CDC describes as "barrier protection" from droplets and "respiratory particles." As such, their primary recommended use isn't for people hoping to avoid catching COVID-19, but for those who already have it to prevent infecting others when they cough or sneeze. But since surgical masks have been shown to decrease transmission rates during flu seasons, other authorities, including Hong Kong health officials, recommend everyone mask up.

While respirators are vastly more effective than 17th century plague masks, surgical masks aren't all that different, providing a barrier that might be effective, but are ultimately imperfect against viruses. In comparing surgical masks to plague masks, what's surprising is not how it highlights modern medicine against the backwards thinking of earlier centuries, but instead how plague doctors, even while working from imperfect premises, got a few things right, or half-right.

There's still a lot more people got disastrously wrong in historical responses to pandemics. What may be surprising is how often the failures of the past continue into the present.

On the Smithsonian Channel series Mystic Britain: Witches and Demons (above), Dr. Elma Brenner of London's Wellcome Library describes a circular diagram, or "plague charm," meant to guard against pestilence.

"These charms quite often had some kind of instruction to write them on the body, sometimes in blood," Brenner says. "But you could do other things with this. You could copy it onto a scrap of paper and carry it on your body, for instance."

While plague charms would seem out-of-place during the coronavirus pandemic, we still aren't immune to the allure of amulets, charms, talismans and snake oil. In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission issued warning letters to companies selling "fraudulent COVID-19 products," including herbal teas, essential oils, tinctures and colloidal silver.

In 1621, Oxford University scholar Robert Burton published his masterpiece, The Anatomy of Melancholy, which purported to be a medical textbook addressing melancholia, or what we'd describe today as clinical and other forms of depression. Instead, the book is more a wild miscellany of advice, using a library's worth of sources, stretching back centuries, to address the breadth of human emotional and physical wellbeing. Along the way, Burton lists dozens of folk cures, herbal remedies, magical spells and amulets useful for fighting disease.

Some are recognizable, like St. John's Wort, which Burton describes as most effective at driving away "all phantastical spirits" when gathered "on a Friday in the hour of Jupiter" and hung in a bag around your neck. But other amulets include wolf's dung for colic and "a ring made of the hoof of an ass's right fore-foot." Precious stones, in particular, can be effective in treating just about anything.

But maybe the strangest is an amulet Burton describes his mother using to treat fevers: a spider, trapped in a nutshell and wrapped in silk. But while it's unlikely to catch on today, Burton's reaction to his mother's spider amulet carries with it a cautionary tale for our modern reaction to the coronavirus pandemic.

"Quid aranea cum febre? What has a spider to do with fever? For what antipathy?" Burton writes, doubting his mother's folk remedy. But then he does a little more reading. "Til at length, rambling amongst authors (as often I do), I found this very medicine in Dioscorides, approved by Mattiolus, repeated by Aldrovandus; I began to have a better opinion of it, and to give more credit to amulets, when I saw it in some parties answer to experience."

While initially skeptical of amulets, Burton finds himself a believer after discovering that first century Greek physicians endorsed spider nutshells. This appeal to antiquity remains a potent source of misinformation today: treatments that are described as ancient are assumed to have some efficacy, otherwise why would we have used it for so long?

As a sales tactic, it can be especially potent when wielded by scammers and practitioners of alternative medicine. Silver has a long history of medical use, since the metal is toxic to bacteria, but its uses as an antibiotic are dubious. Nevertheless, alternative medicine peddlers have heralded colloidal silver as a cure-all for all sorts of maladies, including as a treatment for the coronavirus. Far right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been advertising the effectiveness of colloidal silver toothpaste in treating COVID-19, while televangelist Jim Bakker has been sued for selling a similar silver-based tincture. So while amulets have largely been set aside in the 21st century, we are still prone to quackery and snake oil.

Modern talismans aren't just peddled by grifters and scammers either. Guns have become uniquely American amulets during the coronavirus outbreak. Buyers cite the need for protection against civil disorder and their looting neighbors. But while medical systems throughout the world are overtaxed by COVID-19, no country is experiencing the kind of social breakdown gun buyers imagine. When it comes to objects meant to ward against evil or danger, but with zero effectiveness against the coronavirus, the massive increase in firearms and ammunition exemplifies talismanic thinking.

We also remain prone to a strange form of fatalism, which valorizes the coronavirus pandemic as an unavoidable, even necessary, reaction to the state of humanity. In his Anatomy, Burton summarizes some of the positive views held by religious authorities and philosophers:

"Sickness, diseases, trouble many, but without cause; 'It may be 'tis for the good of their souls'; pars fati fuit ['twas part of their destiny], the flesh rebels against the spirit; that which hurts the one must needs help the other. Sickness is the mother of modesty, putteth us in mind of our mortality; and when we are in the full career of worldly pomp and jollity, she pulleth us by the ear, and maketh us know ourselves. Pliny calls it the sum of philosophy, 'if we could but perform that in our health, which we promise in our sickness.'"

In this formulation, disease becomes an expression of virtue, either because suffering results in some form of purification, or because it makes us humble. Similar sentiments are still expressed today. On Sunday, Florida megachurch pastor Guillermo Maldonadowho hosted a January rally for President Donald Trump, according to Right Wing Watchdescribed the coronavirus as the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and a harbinger of the End Times. He described the virus as a test of his parishioners faith and virtue, urging them to ignore public health warnings to demonstrate they truly sought God's protection (he has since suspended services).

But while religious justifications for disease as somehow "good for the soul" still exist today, the mindset also takes on different, more modern forms. You may have seen viral tweets celebrating the return of wildlife to spaces previously dominated by humans and their pollution:

But notice also a darker undercurrent, which describes the coronavirus as a form of retributive justice; a purification for the planet, instead of the soul:

Actor Vanessa Hudgens (High School Musical, Spring Breakers) offered a dramatic example of fatalism masquerading as a form of brave realism, even virtue, in an Instagram Live video posted Tuesday.

"I'm sorry. But it's a virus. I get it. Like, I respect it, but at the same time, even if everybody gets it... yeah, people are going to die, which is terrible, but inevitable," Hudgens said in the video, since deleted. Hudgens issued an apology for the video, but the mentality can be found everywhere, from St. Patrick's Day revelers to Florida retirees.

In 1722, Londoner Daniel Defoe, already famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published A Journal of the Plague Year, a novelistic account of the last major bubonic plague epidemic to strike England, the Great Plague of 1665. The meticulously researched historical fiction includes many of the same public reactions as those seen today, including defiant partying in a pandemic's looming shadow, talismanic thinking and the spread of snake oil cures and inaccurate medical information.

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"They ran to conjurers and witches, and all sorts of deceivers, to know what should become of them (who fed their fears, and kept them always alarmed and awake on purpose to delude them and pick their pockets), so they were as mad upon their running after quacks and mountebanks, and every practising old woman, for medicines and remedies; storing themselves with such multitudes of pills, potions, and preservatives, as they were called, that they not only spent their money but even poisoned themselves beforehand for fear of the poison of the infection; and prepared their bodies for the plague, instead of preserving them against it," Defoe writes in his fictional Journal.

While the far lower mortality rate and modern medical science mean the coronavirus pandemic will never approach the horrors of historical plagues, we can find in the past some of the same responses as today, including the rush to hoard supplies and the same proliferation of bad information. Instead of confronting death in the "heaps of dead bodies lying unburied" described by Defoe, we check and recheck the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker. We may not be seeking cures using the Philosopher's Stone, as surgeon Sigismund Bacstrom attempted in the 1700s, but we are, in our character, much the same as people were then.

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Are Surgical Masks the New Plague Masks? A History of the Not-Always-Helpful Ways We've Reacted to Pandemics - Newsweek

Straddling the line between advocacy documentary and D.I.Y. infomercial, Dosed promotes psychoactive vegetation as a potential cure for drug addiction. The filmmaker, Tyler Chandler, trails a friend, known in the film only by a first name, Adrianne, as she experiments with psilocybin mushrooms and the hallucinogenic plant iboga to treat her seemingly intractable dependence on heroin, methadone or morphine. The effectiveness of these alternative-medicine therapies, and the question of whether they should be legal, is still the subject of debate.

Adrianne, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, has a third, potentially powerful ingredient contributing to her recovery: the presence of the camera, which, at times, is clearly on her mind. As the documentary opens, Adrianne is asked how she would like it to end. Id love to be sober, she replies, but adds that shed like to be sober, generally. And although her treatment does not follow a straightforward path her initial efforts at a supervised iboga retreat are disrupted by a hospital trip for a panic attack she eventually achieves the sobriety she foreshadows.

Which is great. But the shot-calling undermines the movies pro-psychedelics argument, because there is no way to control for the psychosomatic effects of starring in a documentary. Nor does Dosed do much to counter or even address objections to mushrooms or iboga as treatments, although it does include firm warnings about the need for supervision.

The movie, which was scheduled to be released in New York on Friday, will instead be available to rent or buy on Vimeo. The distributor has pledged a portion of the proceeds to fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

Dosed

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes.

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Dosed Review: The Case for Plant-Based Recovery - The New York Times

A worker in a protective suit at the closed seafood market in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, January 10, 2020. The seafood market is linked to the outbreak of the pneumonia caused by the new strain of coronavirus, but some patients diagnosed with the new coronavirus deny exposure to this market.(Stringer/Reuters)Despite the huge health risks they create, these practices are deeply embedded in rural Chinese life.

The Standing Committee of the National Peoples Congress, in effect the executive committee of the Chinese Communist Party, in late February issued an edict banning the countrys wet markets, including those in Wuhan, the source of the current COVID-19 outbreak. The statement notes that it is necessary to strengthen market supervision, resolutely ban and severely crack down on illegal wildlife markets and trade, and control major public health risks from the source. The Straits Times of Singapore has reported that eight laws have been passed in the last week. We have no details on the contents of the legislation. Its too soon to know, though, whether we have been down this road before.

After the SARS outbreak in 2003, which was traced to a wet market in the southern Guangdong Province, a temporary ban on wet markets and the wild-animal industry were put in place. In July of that year, the World Health Organization declared the SARS virus contained, and in August the Chinese government lifted the ban.

Wet markets are found the world over, typically open-air sites selling fresh meat, seafood, and produce. The meats often are butchered and trimmed on-site. Markets in China have come in for justifiable condemnation because of the way theyve evolved, commingling traditional livestock with a wide variety of wild animals, including exotic and endangered species. Many are quite unsanitary, with blood, entrails, excrement, and other waste creating the conditions for disease that migrates from animals to people through virus, bacteria, and other forms of transmission. Such zoonotic diseases that have emerged from China and other regions of the world include Ebola, HIV, bird flu, swine flu, and SARS.

The wild animals that mix with more common livestock poultry, swine, and seafood form a deadly combination. And, as has been well reported by Vox and others, wild-animal farming has a long history in China, emerging after disastrous decades of state control of rural production under Mao Zedong. By the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, tens of millions of Chinese citizens had died of starvation under a system that could not produce enough food for Chinas population.

Maos successor, Deng Xiaoping, in the late 1970s lifted state controls on rural farming to allow peasant farmers to provide for their own sustenance. Rats, bats, civet cats, pangolins, and other wild animals became staples of rural farming. To acknowledge and even encourage this, the government enacted laws that protected the lawful rights of those engaged in the development or utilization of wildlife resources.

Over time, this led to the breeding and distribution of these animals, and small rural outposts developed into larger-scale operations. Add to this the use of wild animals not only for consumption but as the supposedly magic ingredients in tonics and alternative medicines, and it is obvious that what began as subsistence farming for the rural poor has developed into a substantial industry. Wuhan, a city most Americans had never heard of before this year, is larger than New York City.

Wet markets and commingling with wild animals have created much misery for the Chinese and for the world. Sixty million Americans caught the H1N1 swine flu virus in 2009, while the SARS outbreak killed nearly 800 people worldwide. The COVID-19 death toll is already multiples of that.

We should be skeptical about reports of a crackdown on the wild-animal industry in the wake of the Wuhan catastrophe. We dont know any details about the new laws that have been reported. What will be the enforcement and discipline? Law enforcement in rural China is notoriously lax, in contrast to the cities, where the use of surveillance technology and other means to control the population is widespread. What is the posture toward Chinese medicine, which is a significant driver of the wild-animal industry? While thousands of such wet markets have been closed, how did we get to 2020 with such practices in a city larger than the largest U.S. city?

So far, we may just be seeing a repeat of the crackdown after the SARS epidemic, which was quickly and quietly lifted. We do not know the nature of the current ban. And can we even trust Beijing to keep such bans in place, particularly with a slowing economy and persistent rural poverty? Also, what exactly is banned? It should be all aspects of the wild-animal trade breeding, transporting, and marketing.

There should be permanent closure of the wet markets, given the governments obvious inability or unwillingness to regulate them. Such a comprehensive approach would be a reversal of decades of government policy and market practice, but when we get through this crisis and the toll it will take on the world, we will owe it to the memory of those we lose that there be a global, sustained push to see these practices ended, everywhere.

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The Chinese Wild-Animal Industry and Wet Markets Must Go - National Review