Shortly before my sister Akemi visited from Japan, which would put it sometime in the first half of February, I noticed a mildly irritated spot of skin on my face not far from the left corner of my mouth. My friend Annie had invited us to spend the day with her at her club, and I was very happy for the chance to swim and use the sauna. It was the heat of the sauna that irritated the spot and made me notice it. I didn't think much of it because it didn't itch or hurt, and because I figured it would go away on its own.
Some weeks later, my sister came and went, and I noticed the irritated area had spread to the border of my lip. Having nothing else in my medical history to compare it to, I thought I must be in the early phases of an oral herpes outbreak. I called my doctor and convinced her to prescribe me some Acyclovir to knock out the virus. She ordered a five-day course along with regular swishing with Stanford Mouthwash (a combination of cortisone, an antifungal, tetracycline, sugar, water, and artificial red color). I followed her directions dutifully, and the rash did not get worse but it also did not go away.
A few days later I noticed that the rash had spread to the other corner of my mouth, and was making inroads into my upper and lower left lip. It also began to itch. So I went to the doctor, and she confidently announced that I suffered from cheilitis (which, it turns out, just means "cracked lips"), that it was caused by a yeast, and that the cure was Nystatin. I was relieved that we now knew what the problem was, and a little ashamed that I had not gone to see her sooner. I picked up the Nystatin mouthwash at the pharmacy, and rinsed my mouth several times daily, and applied some to the affected skin around my mouth, as she instructed.
So I was very unhappy when, after several more days, my skin problem was not only not gone, it was worse! The Nystatin made the skin angry and red, and my doctor instructed me to discontinue it. I tried all kinds of topical treatments from aloe gel to shea butter to cortisone cream, but they all made things worse. Even Kazi Dama's Magic Balm didn't help. I was getting quite self-conscious around my patients, since, as a health care provider, having weird sores around the mouth was kind of yucky and didn't advertise my skills as a healthy person much less as a healer. Besides, I had to leave in a few days for an NIH conference in Texas, and I did not want to be dealing with this then.
So, unable to get an appointment in time with the dermatologist, I went in to urgent care. The doctor there, perhaps sensing my frustration with my regular doctor, defended his colleague, saying that cheilitis is most often due to a yeast. It was a good guess, he said, and since we had now eliminated both virus and fungus as the cause, the perp was most likely a bacteria. So he prescribed me some MRSA-killing Mupirocin antibiotic ointment. The stuff smelled like cheap Mexican beauty product, but I applied it several times daily as instructed. Unfortunately, it also made my rash worse. The inflammation pretty much circled my entire mouth, turned red and itchy, then over the course of a day or two dried up and calmed down, then the dry skin flaked off. I was initially excited and encouraged by the flaking off part of this life cycle, thinking that it signified a movement towards resolution and cure, but quickly discovered that the rash was only taunting me; that it would cycle through these phases regardless of what I did.
I went to Texas feeling like the Elephant Man and continued my antibiotic ointment regimen even though it was clearly not working. Finally, in a hyperpruritic frenzy at two or three in the morning on the second night of my trip, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I doused my mouth with hydrogen peroxide. My rash hissed and foamed rabidly and I thrilled in the piercing sting and eventual numbness that settled around my beleaguered piehole. The next day the skin around my lips was crusty and dry, but at least it didn't itch and it didn't seem to be entering into the angry red phase of its life cycle.
By the time I returned to Santa Cruz the rash was swollen, red, itchy, and uncomfortable so I purchased some calendula gel and applied it liberally. I was glad to find that it was the one thing so far that didn't seem to irritate the rash. But it didn't get rid of it either. So, being the resourceful type, I ground up some berberine (from the Chinese patent medicine Huang Lian Su Pian) and mixed up a batch of alkaloid-enhanced calendula gel. If there's a microbe there, I reasoned, the berberine might kill it. For my efforts all I got was a ridiculous-looking yellow ring around my mouth and taunts (and some sympathy) from my family.
I started to get scared. What if this rash was some bizarre autoimmune condition, like pemphigus? Can you get pemphigus from cats? (Charlie scratches himself a lot despite the flea and tick medication we give him). What if it was early stage squamous cell carcinoma? I called the dermatology clinic to see if I could get in right away. The earliest appointment they could give me was over a week away. What should I do? I decided I would wage all-out CAM war on the rash. I would cure it by myself before my dermatology appointment! I started taking Huang Lian Shang Qing Wan ("Coptis Clear Heat from the Upper Body Pills") internally and continued the calendula gel (minus berberine) topically. At my friend Gerhardt's insistence I applied some Swiss medicine called NEGATOL (an antiseptic/hemostatic whose chemical name is policresulen). He claimed that if there was something there to kill, NEGATOL would kill it. I figured, with that ringing endorsment and such a promising name, why not? Like the peroxide, it hurt like hell and dessicated the skin around my mouth. I returned to the calendula gel to try to soothe the dry painful skin.
Rather late in the game, I turned to acupuncture. I bled Stomach-40, the connecting-luo point of the stomach channel, since the stomach channel goes to the corners of the mouth and even around it to connect to the Du and Ren Vessels. I got bleeding-happy and also bled Spleen-1 and Liver-1 around the big toe, since visual examination revealed that there was some blood stasis there (my teacher Anryu Iwashina aka Dr. Bear says that before you do anything else you bleed where there's stasis). This got me thinking that my rash might be more a problem of blood stagnation than of heat, dampness, and toxin, so I made a salve of St. Johnswort/gotu kola and Yunnan Baiyao powder and applied it as an experiment this morning. It didn't inflame the skin, but it didn't seem to help much either, so eventually I switched back to calendula gel. I did more acupuncture, to sedate the stomach channel and tonify the spleen, to aim at the dysfunctional channel via its "opposite" partner the pericardium, etc. etc.
The rash settled into a status quo of not itchy and inflamed, but nevertheless chapped and discolored at the edges of the lips. Continuing on the hypothesis that the problem was one of blood stagnation, I began a course of self-treatment three times daily with a cold laser, at 680 nm wavelength. Lasers are used instead of needles by some acupuncturists, and they seem to stimulate unhealthy cells to perk up and regain homeostasis. RISE AND SHINE MOTHERFUCKERS! became my mantra as I blasted my lips with the dazzling red light.
Slowly, the rash subsided. I don't know if this was due to the acupuncture, the herbs, the calendula gel, the NEGATOL, or the red laser. Or if the disease was nearing the end of its natural course. By the time of my appointment with the dermatologist all I had was a faint discoloration of the skin around my lips. I was tempted to blow off the appointment, but, hyperaware of the potential criticism that I hadn't given western medicine a fair shake, I went. Predictably, the dermatologist spent about five minutes with me and prescribed a corticosteroid ointment. "Shouldn't you take a biopsy or a culture?" I asked, visions of pemphigus-unglued skin flapping in my brain. "You read too much," he laughed, and sent me on my way.
I applied the ointment, and at first my skin reacted by getting itchy and slightly inflamed. Here we go again, I thought, overcome with a familiar frustration. But I persisted, and the skin calmed down, and now a week later at about Week 70 of my odyssey I am finally about back to normal (although after a one-day experiment of no cortisone yesterday the rash came back this morning).
What conclusions can we draw from my ordeal?
1) My doctor should have taken a culture at my first visit, to determine what microbe, if any, was involved in my cheilitis.
2) I should have begun the "complementary and alternative" assessment and treatment earlier.
3) Cortisone is a wonder drug.
4) The integrative medicine approach needs to be flexible and open-ended, rather than codified and inflexible.
To expand a little bit on Item 4 above, I'd like to discuss what I see as the conundrum of integrative medicine. Western medicine and most traditional non-western medical systems are unlike each other in many ways, but most fundamentally they are different because western medicine subscribes to the notion of a "standard of care" which follows disease categories and specific diagnoses, whereas non-western medical systems famously "treat the whole person." What does this mean? This phrase "treating the whole person" is so vague as to be meaningless, and in integrative medicine has often come to mean that the patient applies a variety of approaches to their care, often including methods to address the mind (biofeedback, relaxation and visualization, for instance), the body (drugs, massage, herbs), and the spirit (prayer, meditation). In my opinion, the treasure of non-western systems such as traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda is not necessarily their ability to treat mind, body and spirit per se, but their ability to treat each patient's constitution or "pattern" and remedy a person's "deficiencies" and "excesses" (to use acupuncture-speak) in a way that is simply outside the paradigm of biomedicine.
To the western doctor, the patient suffers from an active herpes simplex infection (for instance), and the standard of care is to prescibe an antiviral like Acyclovir. A practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine would choose from any of a virtually limitless range of options, depending on his assessment of the patient's condition. Do the lesions present on the stomach channel, or do they manifest on the liver channel or the Conception Vessel? Is the patient primarily yin-deficient, or qi-deficient? Does the deficiency outweigh the current excess manifesting in the outbreak, and will the herb formula prescibed focus more on strengthening the constitution or on quelling the excess fire and dampness? These may be archaic and poetic terms but they are also phenomenological and clinical. In other words, "treating the whole person" is not simply a matter of throwing the patient a variety of practices and nutrients; it is a way of assessing their clinical picture - and treating disease - in a way that is utterly different from western medicine, and is often very effective.
The problem is that the gold standard of integrative medicine when it comes to complementary and alternative therapies is the notion of "evidence-based medicine." Typically, the informed western doctor will only recommend non-western therapies if there is "evidence" (read: scientific studies) that they work. While this makes perfect sense on the surface of things (why recommend something if it hasn't been shown to work?), the multifactorial nature of non-western therapies makes them problematical from the point of view of establishing efficacy. Do separate studies need to be done for the herbal treatment of liver-channel herpes and for stomach-channel herpes? How do you separate out the effects of acupuncture from the effects of herbs? Should practitioners only do one thing at a time? Does scientific evidence have to be established for the treatment of every disease before doctors can recommend a procedure or a style of healing to patients? Should the results of the research prescribe a standard of care for complementary and alternative therapies?
My answer is yes and no. Yes, more research should be done on CAM therapies and the integrative approach. This will only help to legitimize what we do in the medical and scientific communities. But no, this research should not change the heart and soul of what we do into a subcategory of conventional medicine, with standards of care that dictate how we treat. As reactionary as this sounds, I think that we practitioners of non-western therapies should continue to practice as our forebears have been practicing for the last several thousand years. Chinese medicine is an art, in addition to being an empirical multi-faceted clinical science. The Yellow Emperor would roll over in his urn if acupuncturists started practicing out of a book: "for hepatitis B, needle Liver-3." Unfortunately, much of Chinese medicine in the modern age has in fact been reduced to this. My advice to western medical doctors interested in integrative medicine is to seek out the artists, the practitioners who have mastered the non-western therapies on their own terms, who are creative and resourceful and masterful in their approach to treating patients. Collaborate with or employ people whose individual reputations speak for themselves; don't just rely on studies that show that acupuncture (or whatever) is good for treating A, B, or C, and pick an acupuncturist out of the phone book. I am not saying that evidence-based medicine should be tossed out the window. In this age of the Internet there is much that masquerades as integrative medicine that at its core is simply hokum and marketing. Machines that read the resistance at acupuncture points and, hooked up to a computer, miraculously match your "vibration" to the proper homeopathic remedy or electronic frequency spring to mind (beware of any method that uses the word "quantum" in its advertising).
Certainly, physicians should not blindly recommend things with no rational reason for those recommendations. But I would beg a kind of special status for medical systems such as Chinese medicine or Ayurveda. They are backed by a very long history of continuous use that has, on the whole, demonstrated their usefulness in strengthening patients in their ability to heal. My vision for integrative medicine is one of qualified healthcare practitioners from a variety of traditions, working side by side for the good of their patients, each honoring the integrity and value of the others' traditions and experience. In addition to the cumulative and by its nature always incomplete evidence produced by scientific studies, the evidence these practitioners observe in the clinical domain will drive integrative medicine forward into the future.
Ruminations of a Caveman Healer
Showing posts with label Integrative Medicine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Integrative Medicine. Show all posts
Monday, April 14, 2008
Friday, August 26, 2005
Treating Poison Oak
Summer and fall are the seasons when many people go hiking and camping to enjoy the outdoors. Inevitably, some of those people are going to come down with cases of poison oak dermatitis. Typically, a day or two after contact, they will notice raised red spots and intense itching at the places where the poison oak scratched them. If left untreated, those areas can get quite swollen and even painful (they will be painful AND itchy, not just painful), and the raised bumps may crack and ooze. The offending chemical in the plant's oil, urushiol, can also rub off the points of initial contact and cause itching at secondary sites. All in all, it's a very unpleasant affair that lasts a couple of weeks. Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to avoid it, and failing that, to treat it very effectively. I will outline here my basic approach, perfected over years of suffering and experimentation. I just got back from backpacking with buddies Dave and Andy, and Dave ended up with some real bad poison oak, thus inspiring this post.
1. DON"T GET IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
This doesn't have to involve avoiding wild areas. Educate yourself as to what poison oak looks like in every season. Google "poison oak" (or, on the East Coast, "poison ivy") and take a look at photos of the plant. Better yet, go on a hike with someone who is familiar with poison oak and have him point the plant out to you. Then, when you are hiking and exploring in the woods, be careful and respectful. Poison Oak is one of the great teachers of the forest, and its lessons are awareness and humility. We left the forests a couple of million years ago, and when we return to them now, we are visitors. If we break the rules of care and appreciation, if we stumble through like bulls in the china shop, we are bound to pay in some way, and a couple weeks of itching is one of the less subtle ways that we can pay.
2. ONCE YOU'RE HOME, ACT AS IF YOU HAVE BRUSHED AGAINST IT.
Do this even if you are quite positive that you were very careful and attentive and avoided all the poison oak that you saw. I cannot tell you how many times I skipped this step and then started itching a couple days later. The main thing you want to do is go to the drugstore and buy a bottle of a product called TEKNU. TEKNU, as far as I can tell, is a kind of body lotion made out of mineral spirits. You rub it on your arms, legs, neck, face, any body part that might possibly have been exposed. You leave it on for a few minutes, then you rub the excess off with a paper towel. This serves to dissolve the offending urushiol, which you then remove with the paper towel. Finally, take a shower to wash off the remaining TEKNU plus urushiol.
3. IF YOU GET ITCHY DESPITE FOLLOWING THE STEPS ABOVE, USE A SEVEN-STAR HAMMER.
This is the single most effective natural poison oak treatment option available. The seven-star hammer, also known as the plum-blossom needle, is an acupuncture tool consisting of a flexible plastic handle and a small hammerhead with a number of sharp needles sticking out. If you are an acupuncturist, the best thing to do for your patients who are suffering from poison oak dermatitis is to send them home with a seven-star hammer of their own, to self-treat at home. If you are not an acupuncturist, go to your acupuncturist and ask her to give you one of these miracle-working implements. This is what you do: the minute you notice an itchy area, get out your seven-star hammer and pound the heck out of the itchy area. Actually, all you have to do is tap lightly all around, preferably until you draw a little blood. Then, wipe the area with a cotton ball soaked with rubbing alcohol. The itching will go away, usually for a whole day. If it starts itching again, pound and disinfect again. Repeat for all new areas that begin to itch. Following this procedure will usually keep your dermatitis from getting to the nasty, inflamed, oozing, crusty phase. And you will be virtually itch-free for the two weeks or so that it takes for the poison oak reaction to completely subside. I'm not sure why this method works so well when regular scratching with the fingernails usually makes the itching worse, but it does work!
4. IF YOU ARE STILL ITCHY EVEN AFTER THE SEVEN-STAR HAMMER, USE TOPICAL MEDICATIONS.
You can try calamine lotion, calendula gel, the Chinese burn ointment called Ching Wan Hung (a.k.a. Jing Wan Hong), thinned down yerba santa/grindelia tincture, witch hazel, tea tree oil, aloe vera gel, hydrocortisone creme, or any of the pharmaceutical or herbal treatments that are available commercially. In my experience, the seven-star hammer is vastly superior to any topical preparation, as a primary treatment. But if you are still itching, try whatever is available.
5. AS A FINAL RESORT, OR IN CONJUNCTION WITH TOPICAL TREATMENT, USE INTERNAL MEDICATIONS.
If you are still itching after all of the above, treat the problem from the inside. If you are in really bad shape, with a thigh that is as thick as a tree trunk, or a face that looks like the Elephant Man, you should probably go to the doctor and get a cortisone shot (but beware - long ago, before I knew anything of the Healing Secrets of the East, I got a cortisone shot after my first bad poison oak attack, and it got even worse because it turned out I was allergic to something in the preparation! Oral cortisone did the trick). Less extreme options include homeopathic Rhus toxicodendron 200C ("potentized" poison oak extract); Chinese herbs to clear heat and toxin and cool blood heat such as rhubarb root, phellodendron, honeysuckle, and coptis; and cooling, detoxifying foods such as watermelon and mung bean. My experience with internal treatments for poison oak is that they are hit or miss - they seem to work sometimes, and other times not at all.
I will end with a few words about poison oak "vaccinations." There is this idea out there that you can immunize yourself against poison oak by ingesting small amounts of it early in the season. Being of an experimental bent, I have tried this out on several occasions. The first time, I made an alchohol extract of fresh poison oak, thinking I would take a daily dose of a few drops in water, increasing the dose each day. But I was not disciplined enough, and ended up forgetting to take my dose a lot of the time. Another time, I ate a few fresh poison oak flowers when they were in bloom, thinking the flowers might not be as oily and hence as toxic as the leaves or stems. That particular year I didn't experience any bad rashes, but I don't know whether it was because of the flowers or because by that time I had learned to be more careful in the woods. Last year I ate a couple of poison oak berries and ended up with an itchy butt for a week or so. I was not scientific to the point of purposely scratching myself with poison oak after these attempts at vaccination, and my results are overall inconclusive. If you are thinking of trying to immunize yourself against poison oak, I can only say: proceed at your own risk.
Whatever else you may have gotten out of this post, if you do nothing else, get yourself a seven-star hammer if you're going to be spending any time out in nature.
1. DON"T GET IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.
This doesn't have to involve avoiding wild areas. Educate yourself as to what poison oak looks like in every season. Google "poison oak" (or, on the East Coast, "poison ivy") and take a look at photos of the plant. Better yet, go on a hike with someone who is familiar with poison oak and have him point the plant out to you. Then, when you are hiking and exploring in the woods, be careful and respectful. Poison Oak is one of the great teachers of the forest, and its lessons are awareness and humility. We left the forests a couple of million years ago, and when we return to them now, we are visitors. If we break the rules of care and appreciation, if we stumble through like bulls in the china shop, we are bound to pay in some way, and a couple weeks of itching is one of the less subtle ways that we can pay.
2. ONCE YOU'RE HOME, ACT AS IF YOU HAVE BRUSHED AGAINST IT.
Do this even if you are quite positive that you were very careful and attentive and avoided all the poison oak that you saw. I cannot tell you how many times I skipped this step and then started itching a couple days later. The main thing you want to do is go to the drugstore and buy a bottle of a product called TEKNU. TEKNU, as far as I can tell, is a kind of body lotion made out of mineral spirits. You rub it on your arms, legs, neck, face, any body part that might possibly have been exposed. You leave it on for a few minutes, then you rub the excess off with a paper towel. This serves to dissolve the offending urushiol, which you then remove with the paper towel. Finally, take a shower to wash off the remaining TEKNU plus urushiol.
3. IF YOU GET ITCHY DESPITE FOLLOWING THE STEPS ABOVE, USE A SEVEN-STAR HAMMER.
This is the single most effective natural poison oak treatment option available. The seven-star hammer, also known as the plum-blossom needle, is an acupuncture tool consisting of a flexible plastic handle and a small hammerhead with a number of sharp needles sticking out. If you are an acupuncturist, the best thing to do for your patients who are suffering from poison oak dermatitis is to send them home with a seven-star hammer of their own, to self-treat at home. If you are not an acupuncturist, go to your acupuncturist and ask her to give you one of these miracle-working implements. This is what you do: the minute you notice an itchy area, get out your seven-star hammer and pound the heck out of the itchy area. Actually, all you have to do is tap lightly all around, preferably until you draw a little blood. Then, wipe the area with a cotton ball soaked with rubbing alcohol. The itching will go away, usually for a whole day. If it starts itching again, pound and disinfect again. Repeat for all new areas that begin to itch. Following this procedure will usually keep your dermatitis from getting to the nasty, inflamed, oozing, crusty phase. And you will be virtually itch-free for the two weeks or so that it takes for the poison oak reaction to completely subside. I'm not sure why this method works so well when regular scratching with the fingernails usually makes the itching worse, but it does work!
4. IF YOU ARE STILL ITCHY EVEN AFTER THE SEVEN-STAR HAMMER, USE TOPICAL MEDICATIONS.
You can try calamine lotion, calendula gel, the Chinese burn ointment called Ching Wan Hung (a.k.a. Jing Wan Hong), thinned down yerba santa/grindelia tincture, witch hazel, tea tree oil, aloe vera gel, hydrocortisone creme, or any of the pharmaceutical or herbal treatments that are available commercially. In my experience, the seven-star hammer is vastly superior to any topical preparation, as a primary treatment. But if you are still itching, try whatever is available.
5. AS A FINAL RESORT, OR IN CONJUNCTION WITH TOPICAL TREATMENT, USE INTERNAL MEDICATIONS.
If you are still itching after all of the above, treat the problem from the inside. If you are in really bad shape, with a thigh that is as thick as a tree trunk, or a face that looks like the Elephant Man, you should probably go to the doctor and get a cortisone shot (but beware - long ago, before I knew anything of the Healing Secrets of the East, I got a cortisone shot after my first bad poison oak attack, and it got even worse because it turned out I was allergic to something in the preparation! Oral cortisone did the trick). Less extreme options include homeopathic Rhus toxicodendron 200C ("potentized" poison oak extract); Chinese herbs to clear heat and toxin and cool blood heat such as rhubarb root, phellodendron, honeysuckle, and coptis; and cooling, detoxifying foods such as watermelon and mung bean. My experience with internal treatments for poison oak is that they are hit or miss - they seem to work sometimes, and other times not at all.
I will end with a few words about poison oak "vaccinations." There is this idea out there that you can immunize yourself against poison oak by ingesting small amounts of it early in the season. Being of an experimental bent, I have tried this out on several occasions. The first time, I made an alchohol extract of fresh poison oak, thinking I would take a daily dose of a few drops in water, increasing the dose each day. But I was not disciplined enough, and ended up forgetting to take my dose a lot of the time. Another time, I ate a few fresh poison oak flowers when they were in bloom, thinking the flowers might not be as oily and hence as toxic as the leaves or stems. That particular year I didn't experience any bad rashes, but I don't know whether it was because of the flowers or because by that time I had learned to be more careful in the woods. Last year I ate a couple of poison oak berries and ended up with an itchy butt for a week or so. I was not scientific to the point of purposely scratching myself with poison oak after these attempts at vaccination, and my results are overall inconclusive. If you are thinking of trying to immunize yourself against poison oak, I can only say: proceed at your own risk.
Whatever else you may have gotten out of this post, if you do nothing else, get yourself a seven-star hammer if you're going to be spending any time out in nature.
Friday, May 20, 2005
On Tea
It is said that when Bodhidharma, the first patriarch of Zen Buddhism, arrived in China from India in the fifth century, he sat down facing a wall and meditated for nine years. During that time, he fell asleep once. When he woke up he was so angry with himself for this lapse in concentration that he tore out his eyelids and threw them to the ground. Where they landed, so the legend goes, the first tea plants grew. Ever since that time, monks have been using tea to keep their minds clear during meditation.
This story is interesting in its depiction of tea as a stimulant herb, but it is known that the origins of tea use go much farther back than the time of Bodhidharma. In fact, tea is one of those drug plants that humans have probably been foraging in the wild, then cultivating on their own, for many thousands of years. And why not? Tea tastes good, refreshes the mind, and is an important medicine in its own right.
Scientists now know that tea contains potent antioxidant chemicals known as polyphenols. A University of Kansas study shows that EGCG, one of the strongest known polyphenols, is about a hundred times more effective than vitamin C in its power to protect against the ravages of the body’s cell-damaging free radicals. The presence of EGCG and other compounds makes tea (especially green tea) an important weapon in the fight against cancer. In fact, Japanese research shows that people who drink four to six cups of green tea every day have a much lower incidence of liver, lung, breast, esophageal, pancreatic, and skin cancers, compared to people who don’t drink tea at all, or drink less. Other research shows that tea lowers the risk of stroke and heart attacks, lowers blood sugar levels, fights viral infections, and helps control allergies.
Because tea has received much publicity for its health benefits, you can buy it in the form of concentrated and caffeine-free pills and capsules. These products are fine for people who truly dislike the taste of tea or wish to avoid caffeine. But, I would ask those who place themselves in either of these categories, have you ever tried a cup of really good tea? Tea is made from the leaves of a flowering plant, Camellia sinensis. Since the best leaves are picked in the springtime before the budding of flowers, the floral essence of the bloom-to-be is captured in the leaves and stems, giving some teas a delightfully sweet, floral scent. Other teas, especially those green teas that have been steamed before drying to prevent the oxidation that would otherwise produce an oolong or a black tea, have a fresh vegetal quality to them that reminds one of an ocean breeze or cut grass in the summertime. My point is that tea drinking is as complex and enjoyable a sensory experience as is wine tasting, and if you think you don’t like tea, it just may be that you’ve never had a decent cup. So give tea a chance and treat yourself to the good stuff! Get high-quality leaf tea (avoid the finely chopped and oxidized tea that comes in tea bags) at specialty stores, or buy online at http://greentealovers.com/ or http://www.imperialtea.com/.
As for caffeine, tea is an altogether different beast than coffee. Or, perhaps more accurately, if coffee is a beast then tea is more like a wise friend. It is the great fallacy of modern pharmacy that the effects of a natural substance can be reduced to a single active ingredient. Unfortunately, this type of thinking has led some to believe that tea, because of its caffeine content, is an unhealthy stimulant. The reality is quite different. Coffee contains about five times more caffeine, cup for cup, than green tea, and its many volatile oils, acids, and other components make for a much rougher ride through our metabolism. Green tea does contain some caffeine, but it exists in an organic matrix of healthy substances, including chlorophyll, vitamin C, and the antioxidant polyphenols. In any case, the overall mental effect of tea is quite different from that of coffee, more the heightened awareness of a samurai warrior than the mile-a-minute mental chatter of the coffee addict.
But all this talk about health benefits, antioxidants and caffeine is almost beside the point. The true value of tea, in my opinion, is that its proper preparation and ingestion require us to pause for a few moments in our mad scramble through life. This is how you do it: you let the dry leaves fall into a favorite ceramic teapot, cover them with hot but not boiling water, put the lid on, and wait. After a couple of minutes you pour the tea, and let its sweet fragrance waft up and enter into you. The fertile earth, the monsoon rains, the blazing sun have conspired to place in your hands a bowl of jade-colored dew. You drink it with gratitude, then go about your day.
This story is interesting in its depiction of tea as a stimulant herb, but it is known that the origins of tea use go much farther back than the time of Bodhidharma. In fact, tea is one of those drug plants that humans have probably been foraging in the wild, then cultivating on their own, for many thousands of years. And why not? Tea tastes good, refreshes the mind, and is an important medicine in its own right.
Scientists now know that tea contains potent antioxidant chemicals known as polyphenols. A University of Kansas study shows that EGCG, one of the strongest known polyphenols, is about a hundred times more effective than vitamin C in its power to protect against the ravages of the body’s cell-damaging free radicals. The presence of EGCG and other compounds makes tea (especially green tea) an important weapon in the fight against cancer. In fact, Japanese research shows that people who drink four to six cups of green tea every day have a much lower incidence of liver, lung, breast, esophageal, pancreatic, and skin cancers, compared to people who don’t drink tea at all, or drink less. Other research shows that tea lowers the risk of stroke and heart attacks, lowers blood sugar levels, fights viral infections, and helps control allergies.
Because tea has received much publicity for its health benefits, you can buy it in the form of concentrated and caffeine-free pills and capsules. These products are fine for people who truly dislike the taste of tea or wish to avoid caffeine. But, I would ask those who place themselves in either of these categories, have you ever tried a cup of really good tea? Tea is made from the leaves of a flowering plant, Camellia sinensis. Since the best leaves are picked in the springtime before the budding of flowers, the floral essence of the bloom-to-be is captured in the leaves and stems, giving some teas a delightfully sweet, floral scent. Other teas, especially those green teas that have been steamed before drying to prevent the oxidation that would otherwise produce an oolong or a black tea, have a fresh vegetal quality to them that reminds one of an ocean breeze or cut grass in the summertime. My point is that tea drinking is as complex and enjoyable a sensory experience as is wine tasting, and if you think you don’t like tea, it just may be that you’ve never had a decent cup. So give tea a chance and treat yourself to the good stuff! Get high-quality leaf tea (avoid the finely chopped and oxidized tea that comes in tea bags) at specialty stores, or buy online at http://greentealovers.com/ or http://www.imperialtea.com/.
As for caffeine, tea is an altogether different beast than coffee. Or, perhaps more accurately, if coffee is a beast then tea is more like a wise friend. It is the great fallacy of modern pharmacy that the effects of a natural substance can be reduced to a single active ingredient. Unfortunately, this type of thinking has led some to believe that tea, because of its caffeine content, is an unhealthy stimulant. The reality is quite different. Coffee contains about five times more caffeine, cup for cup, than green tea, and its many volatile oils, acids, and other components make for a much rougher ride through our metabolism. Green tea does contain some caffeine, but it exists in an organic matrix of healthy substances, including chlorophyll, vitamin C, and the antioxidant polyphenols. In any case, the overall mental effect of tea is quite different from that of coffee, more the heightened awareness of a samurai warrior than the mile-a-minute mental chatter of the coffee addict.
But all this talk about health benefits, antioxidants and caffeine is almost beside the point. The true value of tea, in my opinion, is that its proper preparation and ingestion require us to pause for a few moments in our mad scramble through life. This is how you do it: you let the dry leaves fall into a favorite ceramic teapot, cover them with hot but not boiling water, put the lid on, and wait. After a couple of minutes you pour the tea, and let its sweet fragrance waft up and enter into you. The fertile earth, the monsoon rains, the blazing sun have conspired to place in your hands a bowl of jade-colored dew. You drink it with gratitude, then go about your day.
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