alternative therapies

How Aroma and Aromatherapy Support Trauma Healing

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Written by Helen Nagle-Smith, author of Aroma, Aromatherapy and Trauma and Working with Unusual Essential Oils.

How important is your sense of smell to you? As an aromatherapist, I really value my nose and the complex relationship between my sense of smell and brain. I understand that my olfactory bulb is closely linked to the parts of the brain that process emotions, memories and fears. In the millisecond we smell something we can have a negative or positive response. Inhaling the scent of a rose, takes me back to happy, sunny summer days as a child, playing in my garden with my sibling making rose perfume. 

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Nutritional Therapy in Traditional Chinese Medicine: An Introduction

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Written by Sabine Schmitz, a TCM practitioner and Singing Dragon author of Treating Acne and Rosacea with Chinese Herbal Medicine and Treating Psoriasis with Chinese Herbal Medicine. Sabine’s upcoming title Treating Eczema and Neurodermatitis with Chinese Herbal Medicine will be published with us in September 2024.

In this blog post, Sabine delves into the topic of Nutritional Therapy in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), highlighting its significant role as a fundamental component within every TCM treatment.

Nutritional Therapy in Traditional Chinese Medicine

There are many things to love about China, and one of them is undoubtedly its wonderful cuisine. As delicious and diverse as Chinese food may be, did you know that the Chinese also use food as a means to regulate and restore balance to the body? This form of nutrition is known as Chinese nutritional therapy, and that’s exactly what I want to talk to you about today.

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“I feel my tension begin to melt away”: How water treatments increase the effectiveness of bodywork

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Written by MaryBetts Sinclair, author of Hydrotherapy for Bodyworkers: Improving Outcomes with Water Therapies.

           In combination with skilled touch, water treatments are perhaps the very oldest and most revered of all healing modalities. Pain from injuries, issues from damaged muscles and joints, circulation problems, chronic tension, chronic pain and emotional stress have long inspired healers to relieve suffering this way.

From ancient Rome’s great baths to Russian saunas, Indian Ayurvedic steams, Native American sweat lodges, Turkish baths and Japanese hot springs, peoples the world over use and love hydrotherapy and massage together. In Germany, the warm waters of Baden-Baden have been used for over eight thousand years, and in Bath, England, for ten thousand. 2800 years ago, Irish sweat houses made of sod and stone were used for rheumatism.

As a bodywork student or practitioner, you may be wondering what is the advantage of adding water treatments to your skill set. Here’s how it can improve your effectiveness:

*** Like massage, hydrotherapy can relieve discomfort and pain, stimulate the flow of blood and lymph, and make connective tissues more pliable and comfortable to the touch.

***Hydrotherapy is soothing and stress-reducing. The ancients realized the effect depression and stress can have upon a person, and over centuries, chronic depression was called everything from gloom or melancholia to neurasthenia or dysthymia. In ancient Greece, while warriors bathed to reduce fatigue and promote wound healing, warm baths were also ordered to relieve “dejection and low spirits.”  The founder of modern psychiatry, Philippe Pinel, (1745-1826) recommended warm baths to calm “overwrought nerves.”

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Tracking the Meridians: How to Understand Them

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Meridians are one of the most fascinating gifts we got from Traditional Chinese Medicine. And they are much more than abstract energy lines flowing through the body.

Imagine the following situation: you’re returning home from a journey late at night. You’re tired and hungry since what the airlines serve these days as a main course leaves as much to be desired as the leg space in economy class. You throw your bag in a corner, make a beeline for the fridge and take stock. Perhaps you’re lucky and, despite your hasty departure, it not only harbours the expected appearance of the duo Foul & Mould but also a couple of pleasant surprises. Okay, after a week’s absence, the remains of the veg have seen better days, and a few other items seem to have developed a life of their own despite the overdose of preservatives contained in most foods these days. At least the smoked ham looks acceptable. But better be on the safe side and cautiously guide it to your nose. The odour test delivers what the eye had hoped for. The stomach approves the result with a demanding growl. Together with the emergency ration of crackers you come up with a passable midnight snack. Done and dusted.

Eating: a completely normal everyday procedure with a logical order. Looking, smelling, chewing, swallowing, digesting. A completely normal process requiring many parts of the body to cooperate with each other and interact in a well-orchestrated manner: eyes, nose, teeth, tongue, chewing muscles, oesophagus, and stomach: they all form a functional community for the purpose of food intake. But before we even get to the point when we target and devour the desired titbit there has to be a stimulus, a need to be satisfied, initiating the entire process. Be it hunger, the mood for food or the desire to fill the terrible emptiness of a broken heart with calories. Whatever triggers the stimulus, it encourages us to carry out the relevant actions, one after the other.

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Sensing Through the Skin

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Leonie Taylor & Charlotte Watts explore how our skin is the first line in communication, both to our internal landscape and the world around us.

The integumentary system (aka the skin)

The integumentary system, otherwise known as our skin, is both a boundary and a contact surface, a sensory organ. Every inch of our skin hosts over 2.5 million bacteria. The make-up of the skin microbiome varies greatly between individuals as well as where on the body it is, influenced by:

  • Physiology: sex hormones, age and site
  • Environment: climate and geographical location
  • Immune system: previous exposures and inflammation
  • Genotype: susceptibility genes
  • Lifestyle: occupation, hygiene
  • Pathology: underlying conditions
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Does yoga help reduce inflammaging?

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From environmental pathogens to modern diet, our cells are inflammaging – aging through increased inflammation. How can yoga help?

By Leonie Taylor and Charlotte Watts, co-authors of Yoga & Somatics for Immune & Respiratory Health

‘Inflammaging’, a term coined by Italian researcher Claudio Franceschi in 2000, refers to the low-grade chronic inflammation that often characterises the ageing process. This may partially explain why some older people suffer more from diseases such as COVID-19. Beyond this pandemic, many refer to the creeping symptoms related to inflammation – such as joint pain, loss of mobility or issues related to immune and respiratory health – as an inevitable sign of ageing1.

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Boosting sperm quality with integrative Chinese Medicine-finding ways out of ´Spermageddon´

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Dr. Pojer is president of the OGKA (Austrian Society for Controlled Acupuncture and TCM) and an academic at the Medical University of Graz (Austria). She has written a post based on the topic of her new book Integrative Treatment of Male Infertility with Chinese Medicine.

On average one out of six European couples experience sub/infertility. Looking at the reasons for unfulfilled parenthood, approximately 50 percent are due to female pathology and 50 percent are due to male issues. However, society as well as medicine (both Western and Eastern approaches) tends to focus on treating the female side of childless couples. Since the percentage of male factor infertility is the same as that for female infertility, treatment of the male partner is underrepresented. The overall sperm quality has dropped by 50% within the last 40 years but additionally, the COVID pandemic has aggravated the problem. On top of this, the male factor plays an important role in early pregnancy loss and should be treated to prevent miscarriage.

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The five types of child and teen anxiety and depression

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My first book, Acupuncture for Babies, Children and Teenagers, has a chapter on anxiety and depression which is purely for acupuncturists to guide them in treating it in the clinic.  I realised over the years, however, that there is so much that is helpful in the way that Chinese Medicine understands people which can be applied outside of the clinic.  This wisdom can be used by parents, at home, to make changes which will support their child’s mental-emotional health.  That is why I chose to write a second book, for parents and practitioners. 

One of the many tools we have to support young people whose mental health is struggling, is our ability to make a ‘bespoke’ diagnosis of exactly the nature of each person’s distress.  ‘Anxiety’ and ‘Depression’ are necessary but limiting labels that are used to describe a multitude of different feeling states.  Using the Five Element model, we can begin to understand that one child’s anxiety is very different from the next, and that each child’s depression will have a unique flavour to it. 

Let’s take a look at each Element to illustrate this.

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