Herbal Medicines

As you know, acupuncture uses needles to optimize and balance the flow of vital energy (Qi) in the body. When the flow of energy is unbalanced, or "stuck", mental, physical or emotional illness emerges as a result.

The diagnosis is made mostly by observation. The practitioner will take your pulse at several locations on your wrist, observe your face, your tongue and your skin.

The practitioner will take your pulse on both wrists. Surface pulse and deep pulse are evaluated, at several pulse points. Possible descriptions of the pulse can relate to the speed of the pulse, the strength and the nature. Often terms like flow, rapid floating or sunken are used.

Tongue observation is a very common method of diagnoses in Chinese Medicine. The color, level of moisture, texture of the tongue all provide information about the health condition of the person being diagnosed. The practitioner will look at the coating of the tongue, if it's white, gray or reddish. The dots on the tongue, if they are present, their color and condition. Is the tongue moist or dry? All these will contribute to the development of a treatment plan.

In addition to observations, the practitioner will also discuss your symptoms with you, find out about your lifestyle, nutrition, and exactly how you feel, at what time of the day. The practitioner will also try to find out any correlations with other factors. For example, do the symptoms increase when tired? Do they decrease after a rest, or after a certain food is consumed?

In short, diagnosis in Chinese Medicine is very different than diagnosis in a western clinic. Some of the questions and practices may surprise you and look quite different to you. However, the process of diagnosis is very thorough and time is taken to diagnose correctly.

The result of the diagnosis, too, will be significantly different from a diagnosis of a western physician, and might not have an immediate significance or meaning to you.

However, this diagnosis will lead to the creation of a treatment plan, and might lead to recommendations regarding your nutrition plan and lifestyle.

Rosemary has always been known as a versatile, aromatic herb. For centuries, rosemary has been used for everything from scent for cosmetics and perfumes to insect repellants, ingredients for a variety of dishes to herbal medicine.

The rosemary is known to scientific circles as Rosmarinus officinalis and it is native to the Mediterranean area. It is a member of the mint family and as such its leaves are evergreen in color. It is related to other popular herbs like basil, marjoram, and oregano.

Usage of rosemary dates back to 500 B.C. when it was used as a culinary and medicinal herb by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Today, it is still a popular spice and an even more popular herb. In 1987, researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey patented a food preservative derived from rosemary. It seemed that extract from rosemary contained certain substances that reduce the effects of oxidation which turns apples brown. In later studies, this substance was identified as rosemary antioxidant extract.

Rosemary antioxidant extract contains several beneficial substances with antioxidant properties. Some of these substances include borneol, camphor, eucalyptol, and pinene in its essential oils, which can irritate the skin. Yet, surprisingly enough, rosemary antioxidant extract is also used in rheumatic liniments and ointments for its soothing effect.

Rosemary antioxidant extract also contains chemicals called quinines. Quinones are rosemary antioxidant extracts that, according to laboratory studies, can inhibit carcinogens which are linked with cancer. Thus, rosemary antioxidant extract is ranked high on the list of cancer-prevention and reduction foods.

Rosemary antioxidant extract may be bought in the form of dietary supplements where usually, they are accompanied by other popular antioxidant nutrients such as vitamins C, E, and A. However, if you want to get the most out of the benefits of rosemary antioxidant extract, fresh rosemary is the best choice.

You can make your own rosemary antioxidant extract from fresh rosemary available in markets year-round. Dried and powdered versions of rosemary antioxidant extract are also available in the spice section. For best effect in your rosemary antioxidant extract, store fresh rosemary in a plastic bag or in a glass of water in the refrigerator. To dry your own rosemary antioxidant extract, hang fresh sprigs in a warm, dry place.

The formula for standardized rosemary antioxidant extract includes, 10% picrosalvin (carnosol), 0.5% carsonic acid (rosmaricine), 2.5% rosmarinic acid HPLC. This standard is widely used in health food industry and as oil antioxidant to protect food and keep it in good condition. They also help increase general heath, cure cough, and increase eyesight.

The following is a slightly modified version of an email that went out to all Mark’s Daily Apple readers who openly expressed (either in the comment boards or via email) their interest in being participants in the 30-Day Primal Health Challenge. We thought we’d publish it here to offer our services (we’ll, as always, do our best to answer all comments and emails) to all participants and to request your feedback. We’ll be publishing weekly reader-experience updates, so if you’d like to share your story feel free to drop us a line.

Also, Charlotte of The Great Fitness Experiment will be going Primal for this challenge (she’s a sucker for experiments). She has put together a good summary of Primal guidelines for her readers. Check out her blog post in addition to our archives of over 1,200 blog posts to get you off on the right foot!

This is a special email to all 30-Day Primal Health Challenge devotees. As the post stated, this is a simple experiment to see what living 100% Primal 100% of the time is like. All you have to do is act as if.

At the end of the challenge we hope you can take something positive away from the Primal Blueprint, and more importantly that you can learn something about yourself and the lifestyle you had been leading.

Over the course of the 30 days you may lose weight, gain muscle, see increased energy, sleep soundly, and be able to more effectively handle stress. You may also find making lifestyle changes (however small) exceedingly difficult. (It is a challenge after all!) Because of this we will be offering special help and support to all participants.

If you have any questions about the Primal Blueprint, are having trouble sticking with the challenge, or need some advice or encouragement just drop us a line via email or leave a reply below for all to weigh in on.

For this challenge we will also be opening up our blog to the voices of challenge participants. Share your story - difficult hurdles, successes, triumphs, results etc. - with fellow MDA readers, so they can use it as encouragement and guidance in their efforts to lead a healthy lifestyle. If you are interested in providing regular weekly updates and/or your final results feel free to send us an email by the following dates:

July 9 - 1st week results

July 16 - 2nd week results

July 23 - 3rd week results

July 31 - 30 day challenge results

The challenge will officially begin today, July 1st.

Thank you for your participation and please stay in touch!

We’ve talked at length about the health benefits of certain foods, even going so far as to label them “Smart Fuels.” And, while we stand by our statements that there are foods out there that are particularly good for you once the marketing masterminds at food manufacturing firms catch wind of it, these poor foods are hailed as the new wonder food. In fact, they become so popular that they become buzz terms in the industry, able to sell just about any product provided it gets an honorable mention on a product label. Our beef? These so-called super foods can never live up to the hype and certainly can’t confer any kind of health benefit when they are served up in processed food items such as gum, candy, yogurt chips and sugar-laden juices! Read on to see our list of the top 10 health foods that have tried, and failed, to live up to the hype:

1. Acai

If Comedian Kathy Griffin had it right when she said people are afraid to speak ill of Oprah, then label us brave because we’re calling out the Queen of Media for hailing açai (pronounced ah-sigh-ee) as the next super food. Touted by Oprah’s minions as “nature’s energy fruit,” this item boasts 10 times the antioxidant power of red grapes and a “synergy” of fats and fiber to promote digestive and cardiovascular health and essential amino acids for muscle regeneration. While there are certainly health benefits associated with the berries, the folks over at a Friendly Skeptic note that “the antioxidants in açai are not necessarily as potent as has been claimed” and that there is “no scientific basis whatsoever for making medical or health promoting claims for açai.”

2. Pomegranate

Pomegranate juice, pomegranate jam, pomegranate chutney, pomegranate martinis: Once a food is a super food, it weasels its way in to just about everything! We’re not knocking the benefits of pomegranate – which range from promises that it can prevent coronary artery disease to claims that it can stave off erectile dysfunction – what we’re having a hard time with is the price! Ranging from $5 to as high as $8 for a 16 oz serving, POM (and its various tea and pill derivatives) this is one outrageously priced tipple! Also, it should be noted, dear readers, that just one 8 oz serving of POM packs 34 grams of sugar. You’ve been warned.

3. Goji Berries

How could we not love Goji Berries when we ourselves even named them a Smart Fuel once upon a blog? Again, we stand by our statements that they do confer a number of health benefits – including stemming cancer activity and promoting eye health – but at about $60 a bag, we have a hard time recommending them as an integral part of a daily diet! After all, it is a berry we’re talking about here.

4. Organic

It seems that if you slap an organic label on anything (fruit, vegetable, granola bars, vodka (seriously) you get free reign to hike up the price and still have your item fly off the shelves! Indeed, it seems that whenever you add the term “organic,” it ultimately registers as “healthy” with Joe Consumer. Unfortunately, however, this isn’t necessarily the case. Case in point? Our May Top 10 Junk Foods in Disguise, nearly half of which was dedicated to profiling items that were labeled organic but were still unhealthy. Sigh. Next.

5. Green Tea

Of all the recent health buzz words, green tea is probably the most frequently used (and abused) word in the lexicon. Green tea chewing gum… really? Do you seriously think your sugar-free stick of supped-up Bubble Yum is going to confer the health benefits associated with this ancient Chinese medicine? And the green tea “just add water” supplements? Don’t even get us started! In our searches we even found Green Tea Kit Kat Bars hailing from Japan. Ugg. Hopefully, people can see right through these marketing schemes. While we don’t doubt that the polyphenols at work in Green Tea have their benefits, we recommend that you stick with green tea in its purest form – straight out of a teacup. Expect more to come.

6. Guarana

With its fancy name, its fancy country of origin (Brazil) and the fact that its added to just about every herbal supplement and energy drink, it would be plausible to believe that guarana conveys some kind of health benefit, right? Unfortunately, if you do a little research, you’ll find that guarana is… well, basically just a fancy way of saying… uhhh… caffeine. True, it comes from a berry, and we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that the berry itself is rich in tannins and other phytochemicals, but at the end of the day, this is a prime example of a relatively healthy food being blown up as the answer to all of our health needs.

7. Kombucha

Another fancy name, another relatively un-super super food. Kombucha is really just a fancy name for a sweetened tea grown from yeast and Acetobacter cultures. Early studies of kombucha suggest that it may help detoxify the body, but once in the hands of marketing peons, the benefits of the drink are completely blown out of proportion, with one kombucha drink manufacturer using the tag line “can a drink change your life.” Our answer? Not likely. But, at about $3 a pop, it sure will change the size of your wallet.

And now we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for some new super ingredients ready to make their debut on the wild and wacky world of food products:

8. Slimming Ingredients

The easiest way to sell a new item? Tell people that it will help them lose weight or stay trim. Enviga was just the beginning. The latest for your radar? PinnoThin, a polyunsaturated fatty acid pinolenic acid derived from the seeds of the Korean pine nut tree that is thought to act as an appetite suppressant while also delaying the emptying of the stomach so that people feel fuller, longer. The new compound received the top prize at the First International Conference on Innovations and Trends in Weight Loss and Weight Management, but according to a release, that award was based on a study involving only 18 women. We advise that before you get caught up in the hype (toasted pine nuts on everything!), wait for more conclusive evidence of the pros (and cons) of this new product!

9. Uchuva

Uchuva may sound appealing, but what if we told you it was really nothing more than a plain ol’ gooseberry? While it conveys some strong health benefits – providing the heftiest dose of fiber in the dried fruit realm – is it going to change your life? Probably not, but it sure does make a cute garnish for summer fruit dishes or a sweet addition to a ho-hum trail mix.

10. Cweet

We started with Equal and Sweet & Low, but quickly abandoned the little pink and blue packets when Splenda hit the scene (It tastes just like sugar! You can bake with it! It won’t give you the runs!). Now brace yourself for the newest kid on the block: Cweet. The compound – which is derived from brazzein, a sweet fruit found in West Africa – is thought to be 3000 times sweeter than sucrose and 1,000 times sweeter than plain ol’ cane sugar and is already slated for inclusion in products including chewing gum, sports drinks and candy. Want to know where you can pick some up? Unfortunately this compound is still awaiting FDA approval and, even if awarded “generally recognized as safe” status, still won’t hit stores until 2009.

Breno Peck, quack.a.duck, miheco, bookgrl, SiFu Renka, Bruno Roots, foodistablog, ashleyaull, kidjay Flickr Photos (CC)

Further Reading:

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solution An Easier Way Out Of Debt. Cut Monthly Payments By 50%. Herbal dietary supplements refer to herbals that are intended as enhancement to the diet. More often than not, herbal dietary supplements contain more than one dietary ingredient such as vitamins minerals, amino acids and other substances. These herbal dietary supplements are [...]

This article is part of The Virtuous Human Series.

“The brave man is not he who feels no fear, For that were stupid and irrational; But he, whose noble soul its fear subdues, And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from”
~Joanna Baillie

Bravery — A quality of spirit that enables you to face danger of pain without showing fear.

This virtue, like many others, has an inherent value in being kept private. It is not the man who runs around saying “I am the bravest” who is truly virtuous. The man who is virtuous is the one who performs when the time is right.

As Joanna Baillie mentions, if a man does not sense any fear, the man is not brave. For example, it would not be a problem for me to squash a spider. For someone else who has Arachnophobia, an irrational fear of spiders, squashing it may be the biggest ordeal they have ever had to overcome. In this case I am not brave, I am merely accomplishing a task, but our scared friend is truly brave.

Joanna also mentions that if one does not know to be scared, when they clearly should be, they aren’t brave, they’re just stupid. If someone is pointing a loaded gun at your head, and you try to run at them from 10 yards away with a knife, you are clearly not mentally stable.

There is no magic trick to obtain bravery because bravery is within each and every single one of us. Even those people you know that are completely spineless have the inherent capacity to be brave. Even so, there are a few simple things you can to to may help to bring you bravery out a bit from it’s hiding spot.

5 Ways To Bring Bravery Out of Hiding

1. Believe in yourself. It’s very important to know just how special and unique you are. Whether you know it or not you bring something very valuable to this world. You said something to someone who said something to someone who made a huge change in the world, and it’s all thanks to you. I’m sure this type of thing has happened to you without even realizing. Keep growing and developing yourself and your time to be brave will come and you will be ready!
2. Constant and Never Ending Improvement. Personally I get a lot of bravery from getting better at something on a consistent basis. To set goals bigger than I think are possible and to work towards them, slowly but surely, every single day allows me to overcome goals that are seemingly impossible at first.
3. Just Do It. Over thinking a situation could lead to you talking yourself out of taking the next step. Imagine standing at the tip of an Olympic height diving board getting ready for your first ever dive. The conversations going through your head could potentially talk you out of the jump. To just walk up there and jump, to just do it, is the perfect way to get over your fear and be brave.
4. Optimism. A great attitude about what you have to face will get you pumped up, motivated, and ready to break through the obstacle which you are facing. Our minds are very much operated by our self-talk, but instead of leaving our self-talk to irrational subconscious fear we could interject with talks of bravery, optimism, and results.
5. Greater Cause. Often times, when inspired by a great cause, such as the life of a loved one, we are pushed beyond our comfort zone and percevere past fear into the realm of courage and bravery. I had a fear of public speaking, but right around the time that I joined Toastmasters I realized that the message I have is too important to not tell the whole world about. This helped me to get over that fear really quick.

This post is part of The Virtuous Human Series. There will be many articles in this series — make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a thing!

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Surprisingly, there is Herbal remedy for cirrhosis of the liver. Despite what you have heard, home certain home remedies can help prevent.