Madison Wisconsin Massage School

A few weeks ago, Marian Geoghan’s back started killing her.

The 87-year-old resident of Peconic Landing in Greenport said she’d suffered from back pain on and off for years, but only recently did it take a turn for the worse. She wasn’t sure what was causing it, but she knew she didn’t want to go through any major surgery.

She also didn’t want to take measures such as massage or acupuncture that could be too conservative to ease her chronic pain. Ms. Geoghan said she had learned that lesson about three years ago, when she let a fractured rib heal on its own.

“I was laid up for three months in the summertime,” she said. “There wasn’t much I could do for it other than painkillers and rest.”

Her solution this time around was to see Dr. Frank Adipietro, interventional pain management specialist at Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport. He recommended that Ms. Geoghan go through a minimally invasive surgical procedure for spinal bone fractures called balloon kyphoplasty.

“This lady has a history of compression fractures,” he said before the surgery last Friday. “Right now, she has one that has been troubling her for weeks, and it’s been very painful.”

‘We can take a patient who has been in complete pain and get her right back on her feet.’ Dr. Frank Adipietro, Eastern Long Island HospitalOsteoporosis causes more than 700,000 spinal fractures each year in the U.S., more than twice the annual number of hip fractures, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation. Because of the complexity of back pain, Dr. Adipietro added, about two-thirds of these fractures go undiagnosed or untreated. But once the correct diagnosis is made, kyphoplasty can take away back pain almost immediately, the doctor said.

“This is a situation where we can take a patient who has been in complete pain and get her right back on her feet within 24 hours and living a regular lifestyle, which is the whole key to these pain management procedures,” he said. Ms. Geoghan “has a new fracture which has not been healing on its own, in fact it’s getting worse. She’s the perfect candidate for this type of procedure.”

During the 20-minute surgery — which requires only a light sedative for the patient — cement is injected into the fractured bone through tiny tubes while balloons open up tiny cavities in the bone that the cement can go into safely, he said.

“With other techniques, where you don’t use a balloon, the cement spreads straight into the bone and can sometimes go in a haphazard way,” Dr. Adipietro said. “And what causes the pain is the microfractures of the bone. The cement takes about an hour to cure, then it stabilizes the fractures in the bone and the pain goes away.”

Patients who sign up for kyphoplasty range from the elderly to the “16-year-old cheerleader who herniated a disk to the long distance runner in his 20s to people in car accidents,” Dr. Adipietro said. “Anyone who needs pain management.”

Kyphoplasty — and a similar procedure called vertebroplasty, which is also offered at Eastern Long Island Hospital — recently came under fire from a clinical study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study found a lack of data to support the claim that the procedure will result in an “immediate and sustained reduction in pain.”

“Not only is the short-term efficacy of vertebroplasty unproven,” the Journal reported, “but there are also several uncontrolled studies suggesting that vertebroplasty may increase the risk of subsequent vertebral fractures, particularly in vertebrae that are adjacent to treated levels, and sometimes after cement has leaked into the adjacent disks.”

Dr. Adipietro called the study, which was reported in The New York Times, “unfortunate.”

“Here’s all these people with broken bones, and they don’t know what to do,” he said. “What can happen after the procedure is that the pain caused by the bone fracture goes away but different types of pain associated with standard back issues then begin to pop up. Researchers obviously picked this topic and said, ‘OK, does this work better than conservative measures?’ Well, those of us who do the procedure almost on a daily or weekly basis can tell you that we have patients out there that would be in chronic pain if this procedure were not done.”

Minimally invasive surgery is always better than the old methods of “opening the back up” to fix a fractured bone, Dr. Adipietro added.

“Sometimes people would be in body casts for three to six months,” he said.

In Dr. Adipietro’s view, having the procedure done when a person is already in chronic pain can’t hurt — because it isn’t going to get worse after the quick and simple operation, he said.

Two days after her operation, Ms. Geoghan said that she wasn’t quite comfortable yet but she wasn’t in as much pain as she had been three weeks before.

“It’s day by day,” she said. “Today is better than the day before. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll feel much better.”

SOURCE: The Suffolk Times

This information is brought to you by Dr. XiPing Zhou, M.D.O.M., L.Ac. Dr. Zhou is founder & president of East West Healing Arts Institute Massage School, Dr. Zhou’s Acupuncture & Pain Management Clinic, Madison Family Wellness Community Clinic,  The Herbal Palace, & China Delight Tours. Visit anyone of these websites to learn about Chinese medicine and culture.

Physiotherapy may prevent lymphedema after breast cancer surgery that involves dissection of axillary lymph nodes, researchers say.

Significantly fewer women developed the condition when they were given physiotherapy, compared with women who only received education on preventing the condition, Maria Torres Lacomba, MD, of Alcala de Henares University in Madrid, and colleagues reported online in BMJ.

Lymphedema results from surgery or radiotherapy for breast cancer and is the most important chronic complication after dissection of the axillary lymph nodes, the researchers said. It impairs lymph drainage from the arm, resulting from an imbalance between filtration and resorption.

To determine the effectiveness of early physiotherapy in reducing the risk of lymphedema, the researchers assessed 120 women who’d had breast surgery involving dissection of axillary lymph nodes between May 2005 and June 2007 at Asturias Hospital in Madrid.

The early physiotherapy group was treated by a physiotherapist with a program that included manual lymph drainage, massage of scar tissue, and shoulder exercises, as well as an educational component.

The control group received only the educational material, which discussed the condition and how to prevent it through shoulder exercises.

All patients were followed for a year.

A total of 16% of the women developed secondary lymphedema: 25% of those in the control group versus 7% in the intervention group (P=0.01).

That translated to a 72% decreased risk of lymphedema (HR 0.28, 95% CI 0.10 to 0.79).

By the 12-month follow-up visit, the volume ratio between arms had increased in both groups.

In the control group, the affected arm was on average 5.1% greater in volume than the unaffected arm, whereas in the intervention group the affected arm was on average 1.6% greater than the unaffected arm (P=0.0065).

In a survival analysis, secondary lymphedema was diagnosed four times earlier in the control group than in the intervention group (HR 0.26, 95% CI 0.09 to 0.79, P=0.01).

The manual lymph drainage in this study involved gently massaging the area to improve lymph circulation, which improves the removal of interstitial fluid.

“We think that the implementation of manual lymph drainage after surgery for breast cancer in the early physiotherapy group could have contributed to the better results in that group,” the researchers wrote.

They noted that the study was limited by a short duration of follow-up, by the fact that it was limited to one hospital, and by a definition of lymphedema in which measurement errors could have been significant.

The study also was not powered to examine subgroups of patients. Patients who developed lymphedema were more likely to be overweight, to have had more lymph nodes removed, and to have developed postoperative complications regardless of assignment to physiotherapy or control.

Even so, the researchers concluded that early physiotherapy “could help prevent and reduce secondary lymphedema in patients after breast cancer surgery involving dissection of axillary lymph nodes, at least for one year after surgery.”

Further studies are needed, they wrote, “to clarify whether early physiotherapy after breast cancer surgery can remain effective in preventing secondary lymphedema in the longer term.”

In an accompanying editorial, Andrea Cheville, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., wrote that “several factors should be considered when generalizing the results to clinical practice.”

Cheville noted that physiotherapy can vary depending on therapists’ training, and the study couldn’t determine which component of the intervention — manual lymph drainage, massage of the scar, shoulder exercises, and education — had the most significant effect on outcomes.

She also noted that the study was limited to one year, so “we do not know if the intervention prevented or simply delayed lymphedema.”

Still, Cheville wrote that the “limited but compelling evidence supports the usefulness of physiotherapy after surgical clearance of the axillary lymph nodes to control pain, enhance shoulder functionality and range of motion, and reduce a woman’s risk of developing lymphedema.”

This information is brought to you by Dr. XiPing Zhou, M.D.O.M., L.Ac. Dr. Zhou is founder & president of East West Healing Arts Institute Massage School, Dr. Zhou’s Acupuncture & Pain Management Clinic, Madison Family Wellness Community Clinic,  The Herbal Palace, & China Delight Tours. Visit anyone of these websites to learn about Chinese medicine and culture.

Massage therapy is a proven, non invasive way to reduce chronic stress levels in the body.  Dozens of studies have shown the effectiveness of massage therapy in reducing stress and millions of people avail themselves to the services of massage therapists to treat stress.  Using massage to reduce stress is natural and safe and unlike some forms of alternative therapies, massage therapy is a proven discipline within the medical community with scientific evidence supporting the use of massage for stress management.

What is Stress?
Stress is your body’s way of responding to a physical or emotional demand.  Everyone experiences increased stress levels at one time or another.  In fact, the body’s ability to react to stressful situations and deal with threats is critical to our survival.  However, when one is under long term stress caused by ongoing situations such as work or family problems, financial concerns, etc. the body will be in a constant heighten state – a state which has harmful effects on many bodily systems including the immune system, cardiovascular system, endocrine system, reproductive system, etc.

Does massage therapy reduce stress?
The answer to this question is unequivocally yes – massage therapy does reduce stress levels. According to The Franklin Institute web site on the human brain and stress, “Massage releases endorphins that calm the peripheral nervous system.”  The Mayo Clinic website identifies massage as a valid medical method to reduce stress and pain.  It goes on to say, “Massage reduced anxiety in depressed children and anorexic women. It also reduced anxiety and withdrawal symptoms in adults trying to quit smoking.”

In fact there are many studies that have proven the effectiveness of massage in reducing stress in various situations:

• In October 2008 the journal Psychooncology published a study entitled, “Massage in patients undergoing intensive chemotherapy reduces serum cortisol and prolactin.” The conclusion of the study stated, “…a significant reduction in cortisol (stress hormone) could be safely achieved through massage, with associated improvement in psychological well-being.”
• In May 2008 The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry published a study entitled, “Pilot study evaluating the effect of massage therapy on stress, anxiety and aggression in a young adult psychiatric inpatient unit.”  The study concluded that “Massage therapy had immediate beneficial effects on anxiety-related measures.”

This information is brought to you by Dr. XiPing Zhou, M.D.O.M., L.Ac. Dr. Zhou is founder & president of East West Healing Arts Institute Massage School, Dr. Zhou’s Acupuncture & Pain Management Clinic, Madison Family Wellness Community Clinic,  The Herbal Palace, & China Delight Tours. Visit anyone of these websites to learn about Chinese medicine and culture.