Aging Can Be Beautiful

by Dr. Allan Fradsham  

I just finished reading an article on a number of people who have died or suffered permanent damage from Botox® overdose.  Being a Doctor of Chinese Medicine, I find it hard to believe that this is the ‘solution’ that people have been choosing when it comes to looking beautiful.  Never mind the fact that this particular injectible substance is derived from one of the most poisonous naturally occurring substances found on earth.  The notion of injecting toxic substances into your body is absolutely absurd. If toxin injections are the most popular beauty treatments on the market today, then clearly the general public has been misinformed about how the body works and how to keep your skin looking young and beautiful.   Your skin is the largest organ in your entire body.  It helps to eliminate toxins and pollutants that are in our air, food and environment. Your skin is also one of the last organs in your body to receive vitamins and nutrients.  After your internal organ systems have received nutrients from your blood, your skin receives the leftovers.   A typical North American diet is lacking in nutrition to begin with.  Think about the quality of food we generally consume – processed meals, packed with chemicals and pesticides.  Because of our deficient diet, our skin is typically not as healthy as it should be.  Clients will often come to see me looking for a quick fix for their signs of aging from decades of skin damage.  People are often shocked to find out exactly how much harm they have been doing to their skin 

• Free-radical damage from everyday toxin exposure or ingestion
• Sun damage caused by over exposure or salon equipment
• Toxin build up from smoking, pharmaceuticals, narcotics or alcohol
• Inflammation which causes puffiness or discoloration
• Dehydration of skin cells due to damaged cellular walls

 Damaged skin cells leak nutrients and water, leaving your skin dry and lifeless.  No amount of cream, injections or surgeries is ever going to restore the integrity of these skin cells. Over the years, it all adds up to wrinkles, sagging skin and a poor complexion.  What most people don’t realize is that damaged skin does not change overnight, and that healthy skin is a process.  Until something is done physically to repair the damaged skin, the results will never be permanent. There is no quick fix.  No miracle cure.  No short cut. Repairing damaged skin is the best thing that you can do for your body.  Aside from looking healthy and radiant, there is also disease prevention. 

Skin cancer (Non-melanoma) is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in Canada.  It accounts for over 40% of cancer diagnosis every year. Health Canada reports that the three major causes of skin cancer are smoking, sun damage and a poor diet.   These are also the three most common reasons that skin ages.  This is not a coincidence.  

 What many of us don’t realize is that there is a lot that we can do to prevent the signs of aging and skin diseases, not just repair them.  There are a few different options that currently offer 100% natural skin rejuvenation.  One of these options is Cosmetic Acupuncture. Chinese Medicine is a body of health care that has been used for over 3000 years.  Acupuncture works extremely well as a rejuvenation technique because it targets specific areas to increase blood flow.  The blood carries the nutrients throughout the body, which nourish and rejuvenate and help to eliminate toxins.  By targeting the skin and facial areas with acupuncture needles, your body will:  

• Stimulate collagen and elastin production
• Increase circulation
• Expel toxins and free-radicals from your body
• Repair damaged skin cells and promote new cell growth

 Knowing what we know about skin rejuvenation and how the body repairs damages, it becomes apparent that toxic injections, scalpels and miracle wrinkle creams just don`t have what it takes to improve the health of your skin.  When it comes down to it, you might be doing more harm than good.   Treatments that are natural will never create results overnight.  However, the results you will achieve over time are permanent.  There is no expiry date on healthy, radiant skin.   There is nothing more important in the world than your health.   Beauty is not your age.  Beauty is the Quality and the Health of your skin.   

Recent studies show acupuncture is helpful in treating headaches

By DRS. REMY COEYTAUX and WUNIAN CHEN
UNC Health Care

Headache is a common symptom that affects most adults at some point in their lives. There are many different causes of headache, but the two most common headache diagnoses are migraine and tension-type headaches.


Another type of headache that appears to be becoming increasingly more common is chronic daily headache (CDH). CDH is currently defined as the occurrence of headache 15 or more days per month, largely irrespective of the cause of the headaches.

There are several medications that have been proven to be highly effective in treating migraine headaches, and there are some medications that can be useful in the treatment of tension-type headaches. Most of the medications commonly used for headache, however, have the potential to cause the “transformation” of episodic migraines to CDH. This paradoxical relationship between medications and CDH (in that the very medications used to treat some headaches are implicated in the development of difficult-to-treat CDH) has led many headache experts and headache sufferers to explore non-pharmacological ways of treating or preventing headaches.

The most effective way to prevent many types of headaches, including migraines, is to avoid headache triggers such as sleep deprivation, certain foods, changes in daily routine, allergens, or other activities, exposures or substances that seem to trigger a person’s headaches. When such avoidance of triggers is not possible or not sufficiently effective, the next best non-pharmacological option may be acupuncture.

Acupuncture is a healing technique that has been used in China and other eastern Asian cultures for more than 3,000 years. It involves placing fine, metal needles in specific bodily locations and leaving them in place for periods of a few seconds to one or more hours at a time. This therapeutic technique has been used to treat headache for thousands of years, but only recently has its efficacy in the treatment of headache been studied rigorously.

The results of at least four relatively large and well-designed, randomized, clinical trials were published in medical journals in 2004 and 2005. One study, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), demonstrated that patients in the United Kingdom who experienced frequent headaches and who were randomly assigned to receive acupuncture treatments over a period of three months reported fewer days with headache than the patients who did not receive acupuncture.

Another study, conducted at the University of North Carolina and published in the journal Headache, demonstrated that patients with CDH who were randomized to acupuncture reported significant improvements in quality of life and improvements in their headache conditions compared to patients who did not receive acupuncture.

Two studies conducted in Germany and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and BMJ demonstrated that acupuncture was effective in the treatment of both migraine and tension-type headache when compared to no acupuncture, but not when compared to sham acupuncture (the shallow insertion of acupuncture needles in bodily locations not generally believed to be helpful in the treatment of headache). The lack of a statistically significant difference between “true” and “sham” acupuncture suggests either that the benefits associated with acupuncture are due to a placebo effect or that sham acupuncture confers some “real” clinical benefit, or a combination of the two.

These studies support the conclusion that acupuncture appears to be a safe and effective way of treating headaches without the use of medications, or along with medical therapy. Although it is not yet clear how much of acupuncture’s benefits can be explained by the “placebo effect,” there is very good evidence to suggest that many people who experience frequent or severe headaches may benefit from a series of acupuncture treatments.

Remy Coeytaux, MD, PhD, is an assistant professor and Wunian Chen, MD, LAc, is an instructor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine.

This column was released for publication in January 2006.  www.boomingpractice.com