HIGHER LEARNING MAHARISHI PREP

New Yorker Magazine, March 22, 2004, p34-35

Ben Pollack is a preternaturally self- possessed eleventh grader from Fair- field, Iowa, who is considering a career in public relations, because, he says, "I love speaking to people about what I feel, and what I believe in." Such a misapprehension of the publicist s usual relationship to sincerity will not get young Pollack very far at some of New York City's better-known public-relations establishments; but it stood him in good stead last week when he was flown into town to appear at a press conference advocating the use of Transcendental Meditation among school kids.

 Pollack has been a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation since he was ten years old, and he, along with a handful of other junior meditators, had been drafted by the New York Committee for Stress-Free Schools to demonstrate just how fantastically healthful and helpful a state of what was described as "restful alertness" could be for the city's teen-agers-who, New York parents will have observed, are more typically prone to a state of restless lethargy. The press conference included testimony from a variety of educators and scientists touting the virtues of TM: Gary Kaplan, the director of clinical neurophysiology at North Shore University Hospital, on Long Island, spoke of the "coherence of activity between the hemispheres and the front and the back of the brain," while Jane Roman Pitt, a senior fellow at the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, in Fairfield, Iowa, described benefits more easily comprehended by a lay person. "To walk into a room and see a hundred middle school students in a state of silence- deep, pure silence that you can feel as well as hears wonderful," she said. The highlight of the morning, though, was the demonstration by Pollack and half a dozen of his peers, who, on command, folded their hands in their laps, shut their eyes, and did a few minutes' worth of meditation in their chairs. All of them appeared immediately to achieve a state of restful alertness-except for one small boy who kept rubbing behind his eyeglasses and snatching quick squints at three TV cameramen who-were circling the meditators, shining bright lights in their faces and trying to eke some B-roll dynamism out of the scene. Afterward, the school kids attested to the transformative powers of TM- which, if their testimony was to be believed, was a treatment not just for stress but for the traumas of adolescence itself.

 Riva Winningham, an eleventh-grade student from the Maharishi School with long dark hair and perfect skin and shining eyes, she was transcendently pretty and uncannily composed, as if she were about to apply not for college but for a job on the "Today" show. Ben Pollack, also of the Maharishi School, who wore a gold mezuzah around his neck and a beatific look on his face, likewise testified to meditation's ameliorative effects on the usual unpleasantnesses of teen-agerdom. TM got rid of cliques-"I used to have very few friends, but at this school everyone is friends with everyone," he said-and homework- induced exhaustion. At the suggestion that one way to reduce stress in students might just be to cut down on the size of homework assignments, Pollack said, "Transcendental Meditation makes my thinking clearer, so now I can get through any amount of homework. I can do five hours if I need to." While Pollack allowed that TM could not actually eliminate acne, he pointed out that it had been shown to have physiological benefits, such as reducing high blood pressure. And Pollack showed an ability to stay on message which boded very well for his future career. Had the television-camera lights presented tiny obstacle to his achieving meditative transcendence during the demonstration, earlier? On the contrary. "I didn't even feel the camera; around me," he said. "In fact, it felt more like an inner light than an outer light. -Rebecca Mead

Combination Therapy
Mind-body techniques may not cure cancer, but they make living with it a whole lot easier
By Peg Tyre
Newsweek International

Oct. 4 issue - Akiko Negishi is no ordinary mountain climber. Fifteen years ago doctors removed a malignant lymphatic tumor from her abdomen and along with it her stomach, gall bladder and part of her spleen and pancreas. During her treatment after the operation, she went to Dr. Jinro Itami, who was convinced that cancer patients can better cope with their fear and anxiety and stimulate the immune system when working to achieve specific goals. After a year of training, Negishi climbed to the summit of Mount Fuji. "I said to myself I would live totally different from then on," she says. Since then, she's climbed 20 mountains in Japan, and her cancer hasn't come back. "At present," she says, "I feel good."

These days tens of thousands of cancer patients are using mind-body practices like conscious relaxation, talk therapy, music therapy, visualization, tai chi, qigong and prayer to help them deal with their disease. Eighty percent of cancer patients report using some kind of complementary medicine, a category that includes mind-body techniques as well as nutritional supplements and other holistic approaches. And no wonder. Scientists have found that mind-body practices help patients sleep better and cope with the pain, anxiety and depression often associated with traditional cancer treatments. Recent research has shown that mind-body practices can subtly enhance a cancer patient's immune system, too.

Among doctors, skepticism is giving way to support. For decades data-driven oncologists ignored the largely untested mind-body practices. But in the last few years, "patients have made it clear that they were eager to try it. And oncologists began looking for ways to combine it with the best medicine possible," says Dr. Barrie Cassileth, chief of integrative medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Many cancer treatment centers now offer complementary-medicine programs, mostly in the form of nutritional counseling, support groups and instruction in guided imagery. Says Lorenzo Cohen, head of integrative medicine at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston: "In the not-so-distant future, oncologists will send patients to learn tai chi or yoga the way cardiac specialists now send patients to stress-management courses after they've had a heart attack."

Although mind-body techniques haven't been shown to affect survival rates, they do improve patients' attitudes. In a five-year study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2001, doctors at the University of Toronto found that breast-cancer patients who attended weekly support groups and talk therapy in addition to undergoing conventional chemotherapy reported much less anxiety and pain than patients who went through standard treatment without such help. Conscious relaxation and meditation can counteract stress by lowering heart rate and blood pressure, and reducing levels of the stress hormones cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine in the bloodstream. They also enhance immune function. In a study of 227 breast-cancer patients published in September, researchers at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center found that the patients who received regular relaxation training and attended therapy and a support group had higher T-cell function than those who didn't participate in mind-body training. Along with lifesaving drugs, a little serenity may be exactly what the doctor ordered.

With Hideko Takayama in Tokyo
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

A New Division of Medical Acupuncture at Stanford

Acupuncture getting its due

Stanford's Department of Anesthesia has a new division of medical acupuncture. While campus physicians have used the ancient Chinese treatment in pain management for at least a decade, says chair Ron Pearl, "what's new is creating a structured program to expand its use."

more info can be found at:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/august18/med-acupuncture-818.html

The following is part of the article from this web page, but there are also some other interesting links on the page:

Afraid of needles? The work of two medical center anesthesiologists could change your mind. They’ve seen firsthand that acupuncture can ease pain and help patients relax – not exactly the reactions most people associate with the sight of sharp, glinting steel.

Brenda Golianu, MD, assistant professor of anesthesia, and Emily Ratner, MD, associate professor of anesthesia, are co-directors of the Department of Anesthesia’s new division of medical acupuncture. One of their primary goals is to give patients at Stanford’s two hospitals access to the healing power of needles.

Acupuncture, which consists of putting needles into strategic spots on a person’s skin, can complement Western procedures, Ratner said. Studies have shown that acupuncture often relieves common post-operative problems such as nausea, vomiting and pain, and may also alleviate post-operative ileus, a condition in which the intestines temporarily stop working after an operation. At Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Golianu and others are studying whether acupuncture can help children require fewer sedatives while intubated.

Acupuncture, which the Chinese have practiced for thousands of years, is designed to restore the balanced flow of energy, or chi, in the body. It remained relatively unknown in the United States until 1972 when a New York Times reporter in China had to have his appendix removed. Treated post-operatively with acupuncture, he was impressed with the results and wrote a front-page article about the experience, sparking widespread interest in the subject.

In 1997, the National Institutes of Health released a consensus statement listing specific conditions that acupuncture had been proven to treat effectively and stating that “further research is likely to uncover additional areas where acupuncture interventions will be useful.”

“That statement really opened the doors for the use of acupuncture because it paved the way for a number of insurance companies to cover acupuncture treatments,” Golianu said.

Although Western researchers now agree that acupuncture works for certain conditions, they have yet to discover why. Imaging studies reveal that needling certain points changes blood flow in the brain, and others have shown acupuncture causes the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers. But, said Golianu, “there’s still a black box in terms of the mechanism of action.”

“People say to me, ‘How can you do that because you don’t even know how it works?’ And I say, well, nobody knows how general anesthetics work either,” Ratner said. “But obviously we’d like to understand the basis of how it works.”

Golianu first became interested in acupuncture while in college when she spent her junior year studying in Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. Intrigued by her observations of the efficacy of acupuncture, she returned several times during medical school to Taiwan and studied at the China Medical College. She also spent six months in a clinic in Japan. She completed an intensive acupuncture certification program for physicians offered through UCLA and began to practice it along with the techniques she’d learned in medical school.

As for Ratner, she had an epiphany while on sabbatical. “I came to this realization that there are a lot of patients that fall between the cracks in Western medicine,” she said. On returning to Stanford she called Golianu, who invited her to observe treatments at the Center for Integrative Medicine. Ratner eventually completed the UCLA course as well. “It became pretty clear to me that this was a whole avenue where we could make a huge difference in the lives of multitudes of patients,” she said.

An example, Golianu said, is a 20-year-old man she treated recently who is dying of graft-versus-host disease, a complication of bone marrow transplants in which the donated bone marrow attacks the recipient’s organs and tissues. He was hospitalized because he was on high doses of opiates to control back pain, but was also taking valium and experiencing breathing difficulties. “Then one day I stuck in six needles with some electrical stimulation and he was comfortable for the first time in months,” she said.

Golianu and Ratner hope to bring similar relief to other patients. “You can look at it as East meets West,” Ratner said. “We’re looking to provide the best of both traditions to patients who are in the hospital receiving complex medical care.”

“Acupuncture therapy has been used for centuries and has been largely ignored by Western medicine,” said Ron Pearl, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Anesthesia. “Our pain-management physicians have used acupuncture for at least a decade, but what’s new is creating a structured program to expand its use. One of the things we can offer at Stanford is to learn more about when acupuncture works, how it works and what we can do better.”

Acupuncture treatments were already available to outpatients at Stanford through the Center for Integrative Medicine, and to patients at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital through the Pediatric Pain and Integrative Medicine clinic. Since the division’s official launch in July, it has also put a physician on call five days a week for acupuncture consultations for inpatients at both Packard and Stanford hospitals.

Eventually, Ratner and Golianu would like to expand the division to include more patient services, acupuncture education for medical students, residents and doctors, and an expanded research component.

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