Complementary therapies for allergies, Reiki for police, mindfulness movement, green energy and energy medicine.


It’s all coming together.
A site on natural allergy cures mentions efforts to use CAM therapies for allergies:

To identify the most promising alternative therapies for allergies and asthma, University of California researchers have read thousands of research papers on the use of complementary and alternative medicine. Since most of the papers did not meet the team’s rigorous standards, they surveyed conventional doctors, alternative practitioners, and patients.
The researchers found that allergy patients were most likely to be interested in dietary changes and dietary supplements. So they decided to investigate vitamin C, magnesium, and about a dozen other supplements, including red grape extract, American ginseng, Siberian ginseng, goldenseal root, astragalus root, silymarin, bacopa, elderberries, shilajit, moomiyo, bovine thymus, and bovine colostrum.
In addition, they are investigating the allergy-fighting potential of foods such as yogurt, reishi and maitake mushrooms, wheat grass juice, various anti-inflammatory oils, and – attention, chocolate lovers – cocoa. Before you stock up on chocolate bars, though, consider that it might not be the chocolate itself that is helpful, but one of its many extracts.
The researchers are also evaluating mind-body therapies such as hypnosis, massage, and biofeedback.
So far, there have been some tantalizing preliminary results. For example, one small study showed that subjects who ate a cup of yogurt containing active starter cultures each day had 25 percent fewer colds and one-tenth as many allergy symptoms.

A site called Mindful Living Links includes Energy Medicine Institute – a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that advances energy medicine (not to be confused with our Institute for Integrative and Energy Medicine).
Hey, that’s someone we know! Healers Donna Eden and David Feinstein have put this Energy Medicine Institute together:

The body’s energies are the key to health, vitality, and well-being. Energy medicine is the art and science of working with and teaching people to work with these energies to empower them to live happier, healthier lives. Long recognized by Eastern cultures, subtle energy fields are only recently being detected, studied, and utilized by Western medicine. Energy medicine is transforming health care, as well as having an impact on education, business, sports, and all other endeavors involving human performance. The Energy Medicine Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation that advances energy medicine through:
Public Education
Professional Training
Advocating the Use of an Energy Medicine Perspective within Health Care, Business, and Education
Promoting the Development of Peer-Reviewed Standards
Conducting Research and Disseminating Knowledge about Energy Medicine

Explains David Feinstein in an energy medicine handout on the site:

Energy medicine recognizes energy as a vital, living, moving force that determines much about health and happiness. In energy medicine, energy is the medicine, and energy is also the patient. You heal the body by activating its natural healing energies; you also heal the body by restoring energies that have become weak, disturbed, or out of balance. Energy medicine is both a complement to other approaches to medical care and a complete system for self-care and self-help. It can address physical illness and emotional or mental disorders, and can also promote high-level wellness and peak performance. The essential principles of energy medicine include:
Energies–both electromagnetic energies and more subtle energies–form the dynamic infrastructure of the physical body.
The health of those energies-in terms of flow, balance, and harmony-is reflected in the health of the body.
Conversely, when the body is not healthy, corresponding disturbances in its energies can be identified and treated.
To overcome illness and maintain vibrant health, the body needs its energies to:
Move and have space to continue to move–energies may become blocked due to toxins, muscular or other constriction, prolonged stress, or interference from other energies.
Move in specific patterns–generally in harmony with the physical structures and functions that the energies animate and support. “Flow follows function.”
Cross over–at all levels, from the microlevel of the double helix of DNA, extending to the macrolevel where the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and the right side to the left.
Maintain a balance with other energies–the energies may lose their natural balance due to prolonged stress or other conditions that keep specific energy systems in a survival mode.
Flow, balance, and harmony can be non-invasively restored and maintained within an energy system by:
tapping, massaging, pinching, twisting, or connecting specific energy points on the skin
tracing or swirling the hand over the skin along specific energy pathways
exercises or postures designed for specific energetic effects
focused use of the mind to move specific energies
surrounding an area with healing energies (one person’s energies impacts another’s)

A blog fittingly but simply called Insurance: Health has this to offer on CAM therapies:

For the most part, insurance only covers us when we are sick, or have symptoms. Ask any doctor – western or allopathic (MD, osteopath) or alternative (chiropractor, naturopath, acupuncturist etc.) – about symptoms, and she will tell you that symptoms often are the last indication of a disease process which may have been developing for some time. The most repeated quote about this is ‘the first symptom of heart disease is often sudden death.’
Some insurance does pay for a version of ‘preventative’ care. But the preventative care that is covered is not really preventative at all. In the allopathic system, which is based on the concept of fighting disease rather than promoting health, the ‘normal’ values for a blood test, for instance, are quite broad. Allopathy focuses on disease management or critical care, and alleviating symptoms, generally by suppressing the active biochemical process or removing the malfunctioning body part. If there is no discernible pattern of findings that can be called a disease a common occurrence, there is not anything to be treated, simply symptoms to be removed. By the time you show an abnormality, based on the allopathic model, the disease has already taken hold.
A colonoscopy or mammogram doesn’t prevent cancer; it just finds it earlier so that maybe it won’t kill you, a real benefit to be sure, but not actually prevention. Real prevention improves and sustains your health, diminishing chances for illness to take root, and keeps you healthy, happy and energetic.
The restoration of healing functions of the body is on the other hand, the focus of what is often called “CAM” – complementary and alternative medicine – including chiropractic, acupuncture, naturopathy, functional medicine, and neurontogenic approaches. A CAM approach to a blood test, for instance, looks at a much narrower range of ‘normal’ values, and uses nutritional or lifestyle adjustments to restore normal function. Only natural methods that support the restoration of innate healing capacities of the body are capable of supporting true health, which is the body simply healing because that is what it was ‘designed’ to do.

And Alternative Medicine Daily reports about a study on CAM research:

Is health services research the Holy Grail of complementary and alternative medicine research? Altern Ther Health Med. 2008 Jul-Aug; 14(4): 40-5Coulter ID, Khorsan R
In a 2006 article in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, Herman et al argued cogently that adopting a health services research (HSR) paradigm would help resolve some of the issues that the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) community and those researching CAM face with randomized controlled trials. Although the article makes a strong case for HSR and CAM, it fails to discuss some of the work in HSR that is uniquely relevant to CAM or to provide a critique of the view one gets from HSR about CAM. There is within the studies of chiropractic a sufficient body of HSR, which can help to assess what the contribution of HSR has been in the past and also what its limitations are today. It provides a cautionary tale for CAM. This article looks at HSR in relationship to evidence-based practice and will discuss the limitations and dangers of the view of CAM from the perspective of HSR using chiropractic studies as an exemplar.

Last but not least, a UK boutique mentioned earlier on this blog is marketing Reiki sessions for the police, to help bring calm and handle job stress. This is course completely in line with funding by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) among others to investigate possible uses of energy medicine to help military personnel.
Our law offices represents entrepreneurs, physicians, allied health professionals, CAM providers, health care organizations, and business looking to make a difference. Our logo or slogan, if you will, is and has been for years: Law in Service to Healing.
Our home page notes:

Our firm offers general corporate legal services, litigation consultation, and expertise in health law, with a unique focus on alternative, complementary, and integrative medical therapies.
Whether helping to develop your business structure and operations through regulatory compliance, strategizing to minimize malpractice exposure, developing credentialing and other institutional policies, evaluating and facilitating general risk management, developing tools for intellectual property protection, or providing other appropriate legal expertise, our firm aims to help businesses flourish and prosper, while more broadly serving the clinically responsible, ethically appropriate, and legally defensible integration of a full spectrum of therapies into health and human healing.
We will also provide expert opinions and reports for litigation (including medical board hearings), and represent you in medical board disciplinary proceedings and in general contract and corporate matters, including finding the right legal structure for your business and guiding your enterprise’s establishment and growth through the right advice. Our clients include physicians, nurses, complementary care providers, international corporations, law firms, health care educational institutions, clinics and wellness centers, medical spa consultants, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs.

Sometimes we wonder if our mission has been drawn too broadly, and at other times, whether it hsa been drawn too narrowly. Both judgments are probably incorrect. There is a time and place to draw a balance — to be grounded and specific enough to have a reality-tested focus, and yet to be energetically open enough to embrace the possibility of imaginative futures.
That balance, reaching to the sky and rooted in the soil, drawing heaven and earth together, is the unfolding destiny we are seeing, both for ourselves and as we move together toward the planetary transition and awakening of which so many traditions speak.