There are almost 100,000 deaths in US hospitals each year from preventable medical errors, according to Public Citizen. This number doubles if you use the company HealthGrades numbers. I wonder how many deaths from unpreventable medical errors?

• Only one in eight preventable medical errors committed in hospitals results in a malpractice claim. (Harvard Medical Practice Study Group, Patients, Doctors and Lawyers: Medical Injury, Malpractice Litigation, and Patient Compensation in New York, 1990.)
• Punitive Damages are awarded in less than 1 percent of medical malpractice cases. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996.)

And yet the costs are still high:
• The annual costs to society for medical errors in hospitals at $17 billion to $29 billion. (Institute of Medicine, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System, 2000.)

Could you imagine if the other 7 out of 8 people filed malpractice suits and punitive damages were awared in more than 1% of cases? Our economy would collapse for sure. The interesting thing about the punitive damages was that only 5% of cases paid over 1 million. I guess thats the value of a human life these days. Less then a million. With the creation of healthcare tribunals to get cases out of the court system these numbers will drop drastically in the future. We will be worth less than a 100k in no time.

Malpractice payments for doctors and insurers remain at about 1% of the total health care costs. $4.5 billion in 2001, with total health care costs at about $1.4 trillion. The western health care industry consumes about 15% of our gross domestic product. And according to Dr. Jay Parkinson, this industry runs at up to a 40% inefficiency rate. That is just maddening.

Dr. Jay Parkinson’s Hello Health practice will seriously address the inefficiency problem and give the best quality healthcare. He has created a way for the uninsured and the underinsured get the best healthcare possible. Amen for Dr. Jay.

A final note from Wikipedia:

US healthcare expenditures totaled US $2.2 trillion in 2006. According to Health Affairs, $7,498 will be spent on every woman, man and child in the United States in 2007, 20 percent of all spending. Costs are projected to increase to $12,782 by 2016.

If you would like a half price coupon for a full session of either Structural Integration, Acupuncture, an awesome Massage, a foot-detox session with massage, a private Vinyasa Yoga session, or a Personal Trainer sessions please go to my website and send your email and mailing addresses. I will mail you the gift certificates or I can email you a printable version. Don’t wait as this promotion expires at the end of May. This is part of the ongoing launch of the new Center for Structural Wellness in NYC. We also offer sessions of physical therapy, chiropractic, nutrition, colonics, pilates, and Alexander Technique. Please inquire if you have any questions about your structural wellness.

From the April 21st NY Magazine by Adam Sternbergh.

I got a shout-out in the article “You Walk Wrong”. It’s not much, but I’ll take it.

… I consider myself a very accomplished walker. I mean, sure, I have occasional back pain, and okay, when I walk long distances, I feel a grinding pain in my hip that I never used to feel before. And, yes, when I visited Michael Bulger, a structural integrationist near Washington Park with an expertise in “Rolfing,” a kind of deep-tissue massage, and he Rolfed one of my feet, then had me walk around a bit for a before-and-after comparison, I felt, thanks to my un-Rolfed foot, like a pirate walking on a peg leg.

The article goes on to praise the awesome Vivo Barefoot shoe line that I’ve been rocking on my peds for years now. If you want to experience NYC in a new way, try these shoes - you feel every crack, every temperature change, steel grating, pebbles, hypodermic needles, just everything. And with the clever kevlar protection you can stop bullets with a front kick.

Click here for entire article.

by Karden Rabin, Licensed Massage Therapist at the Center for Structural Wellness

Oi Vay, My Back!

Most of us have back pain. Because we’re all way to busy, we either learn to live with it or latch ourselves to quick fixes, like pain medication, cortisone injections or a couple of cracks at the chiropractor. None of these, of course, are cures; they just dull or block out the pain for a few hours or days.

In fact, mainstream remedies will never restore a person’s back to health when having to live a modern lifestyle. The human body is not accustomed to asphalt streets, concrete sidewalks, handbags, telephones, driving and most especially, sitting at a computer for hours on end. The demands of modern society keep the back oscillating between up-right and slouching forward. Over time, this creates a destructive pattern of ceaseless back muscle engagement and hyper-stretching. Our over-worked and over-tired back muscles become compromised from such abuse and eventually start manifesting more severe issues, including pathogenic displacement of vertebrae and shoulder blades, postural misalignments, nerve impingement, headaches, migraines and many other issues.

They key to finding lasting relief for back pain is to counter-act this daily pattern of abuse to our backs. But who can do that? Are we all supposed to levitate along sidewalks, lie down in our cars, train our pets to carry our handbags and hire someone to answer our email? Although this would be awesome, it’s highly improbable. So we’re back at square one, trying to find an effective, fast and frequent method to alleviate our back pain that we’ll actually get around to doing.

Fortunately, there are techniques that allow us to achieve this goal and they are especially suited for people who want to relax and need a lazy form of pain relief. In fact, after keeping us upright all day long, what our backs are seeking most is a comfortable position or just plain rest. Their dream therapy is effortlessly relaxing into a back bend. Therefore, the lazy person’s path to back pain relief is the supported bridge position

The Science behind the Supported Bridge: Positional Therapy

Eighty five percent of the pain we experience in our lives is muscular in origin and predominantly from excessive contracture or tightness. Often, the key to pain relief is the release of tight muscles, which is why so many of us receive massage or practice yoga. One of the most powerful therapies dedicated to muscle release is known as Positional Therapy. Discovered by osteopaths, it was determined that if a muscle is placed in a position of passive contraction for 90 seconds, it spontaneously releases its tension.

For example, the upper trapezius muscle (the one between the shoulder and the neck that everyone loves having massaged) helps to raise the shoulder towards the ear. The position of release for the trapezius is to lie down on one’s back, lift an arm over the head, and bend the elbow across the crown of the head. It is imperative that once this position of release is reached, the trapezius muscle be allowed to completely relax. The trapezius must not hold itself in this position of release, but lets gravity do the work. After 90 seconds, the trapezius muscle will release, and it will not only feel better but will have a greater range of motion.

The technique is so simple, passive and effective that people would find it unbelievable if not for their undeniable relief of pain. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a great article I’m reprinting in its entirety from the Smart Skin Care site, an independent research collective that does not sell or endorse any products.

An ideal clinical study is set up something like this. First, find a large uniform pool of candidates and randomly assign them to two groups. Second, change a single variable in a controlled way, e.g. administer a nutrient or a drug to the one group and give a placebo to the other group. Importantly, neither the administering doctors nor the subjects should know who is giving/getting what. After the treatment, analyze the results and make a conclusion whether the difference in the outcome between the groups is likely to be due to random statistical variations or the effect of the treatment. Such a study, especially if repeated by several independent groups of researchers unaffiliated with commercial interests, gives you a decent chance of arriving at the truth about the value of the treatment in question.

Well, I have to disappoint you but conducting such a study to find the best diet to prevent or reduce wrinkles is next to impossible in real life. First, a dietary intervention involves too many variables — it is not practicable to vary every single aspect of a diet separately while keeping everything else constant. Second, long-running, interventional studies are very expensive. It is next to impossible to patent a diet, so such a study would require extremely generous public funding, which is hard to obtain for only a “beauty-threatening” problem like wrinkles. And there are other obstacles too. In other words, don’t hold your breath for a definitive study showing what diet is the best ‘wrinkle cure’.

The most comprehensive such study to date was published by researchers from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2001 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. The researchers analyzed the diets of 453 people (aged 70 years and over from Australia, Greece and Sweden) to determine the correlation, if any, between the consumption of certain types of foods and skin wrinkling.

The overall conclusion was that a low-glycemic diet high in varied fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes and fish was associated with less skin wrinkling. Specifically, the following food were noted:

Foods associated with less wrinkling

In the Monash study, less skin wrinkling in the elderly was associated with higher intakes of:

Total fat
Mono-unsaturated fat
Olive oil and olives
Fish (especially fatty fish, such as sardines)
Reduced fat milk and milk products, such as yogurt
Eggs
Nuts and legumes (especially lima and broad beans)
Vegetables (especially leafy greens, spinach, eggplant, asparagus, celery, onions, leeks and garlic)
Wholegrain cereals
Fruit and fruit products (especially prunes, cherries, apples and jams)
Tea
Water
Zinc (foods which contain zinc include seafood, lean meat, milk and nuts).

Foods associated with more wrinkling

More skin wrinkling in the elderly was associated with higher intakes of:

Saturated fat
Meat (especially fatty processed meats)
Full fat dairy products (especially unfermented products and ice cream)
Soft drinks and cordials
Cakes, pastries and desserts
Potatoes
Butter
Margarine

The picture above is a scanned image from Paul Pitchford’s “Healing With Whole Foods”- the best tome on nutrition. I left some text to read so you get his point.

The organs in the body are building from a low point energetically until they peak for 2 or so hours half way through the day and then discharge back to their low - completing a 24-hour journey. This is important because the timing is staggered allowing each organ to complete it’s peak 2 hours after the next. The Chinese clock represents 12 organs in the pie chart, a very spiritual number having to do with control and ruling. Using this chart you can get a glimpse at a deficiency or problem in the organ if you notice something recurring at a similar time each day. Do you wake up every night at 3:30am? Your body might be telling you something is wrong with your lungs. Being aware of the emotional counterpart to each organ, tells us even more about what’s happening inside of us. If you suffered recent grief or are generally drowning in sorrow, this tells you even more about the health of your lungs. From Squidoo Health,

“The seven emotions are thought to correlate with the five Yin organs: joy with heart, anger with the liver, sadness and grief with the lungs, pensiveness and over thinking with the spleen, and fear or fright with the kidneys.”

I like to include the stomach to worry and the gall bladder to bitterness to complete the thorax as a structural whole; the liver, gallbladder, stomach and spleen are all connected to each other and the diaphragm- the arch support for the pericardium, heart and lungs. This is a more complete chart on the organs and emotions by Dr. Bruce and Joan Dewe.

This is from a western study adhering to stringent scientific methodologies on PubMed by Wang et al, 2006:

“Circadian rhythms are about-daily variations of physiological functions that are found in every living organism on earth ranging from bacteria to mammals. These daily rhythms are generated through the integration of the oscillatory expression of multiple circadian clock genes. In mammals, circadian rhythms are regulated by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus. Neurons in the SCN generate self-sustained daily oscillations of gene expression and electrical activity with a period close to 24 hours. The SCN keeps the circadian rhythms of different peripheral organs synchronized to each other as well as to the environmental light-dark cycle. Although every mammalian cell is believed to express circadian clock genes, cells outside the SCN cannot maintain self-sustained circadian oscillation in the absence of the SCN.”

And more simply put:

“Every physiological function in the human body exhibits some form of circadian rhythmicity. Under pathological conditions, however, circadian rhythmicity may be disrupted.”

The body is designed to help us help ourselves by communicating with us when something is amiss. Due to our disassociated lifestyles it’s hard for us to hear these whispers. I hope these Western and Eastern views can integrate and help us understand more about what is going on inside before irrevocable damage is done. For more information, see your local acupuncturist or contact Heather Trujillo, L.Ac at acupuncture@centerforsw.com.

I’m proud to announce that The Center for Structural Wellness has come into existence in the Union Square area of NYC. This is going to be an important step in understanding how human structure and its various expressions effect the health of the individual. Structural Integration will remain the main focus for work here but the Center will also encompass many other complementary, alternative, and western therapies. From acupuncture to Alexander Technique, massage to chiropractic, Biodynamic Cranial to physical therapy, Pilates to Yoga, and also including western doctors who are educated in CAM techniques, all working together to educate everyone on the importance of structural health. There will be a website release in the next month illustrating how this Center will work along with information on all of the affiliates. I will be picking the best practitioners and therapists so that everyone will be guaranteed the best treatment possible. For now please contact me through this address to set up an appointment.

Before and after photos of a client who has undergone the Basic 10 Series of Structural Integration. Notice how much his body is able to balance along the midline and gain vertical lift. What is harder to see in these two pictures taken 3 months apart is the increase of efficient movement, better poise and posture, and an increase in confidence and self-expression.

A recent article on the Huffington Post states that,

“Fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing for low back pain, and either kind performs much better than usual care, German researchers have found.”

It goes on to reveal that 47 percent of patients improved from the real acupuncture, and 44 percent improved from the sham acupuncture (gently needling non-acupuncture points without pistoning or spinning very), while onl7 27 percent improved from conventional methods. I’m glad Structural Evolution is now offering acupuncture. See the blog below.