- Integral Alternative Medicine LLC730 S Dearborn St
Chicago, IL 60605(312) 631-3095 - EVANSTON AREA1609 Sherman Ave, Ste 205, Evanston, IL 60201(312) 631-3095
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Stress management – Alternative medicine
Overworking and staying super busy is important in our times. It seems that if you look relaxed it is because you are lazy or not doing your job. What is happening is that we are immersed in a culture of overachieving at a very high cost to our health, our family and our social life. I do not have the answer to how to handle that, but I do have some recommendations of alternative methods I make to my patients to help manage stress, other to have acupuncture sessions on a regular basis.
Meditation
There are many different types of meditation techniques such as guided meditation, mantra meditation and mindfulness meditation. You can do guided meditation by forming mental images in your mind of places that you find relaxing and using as many of the five senses as possible to experience those places. Another type of meditation is the Mantra meditation, where you silently repeat a word in your mind to help you to avoid distracting thoughts and stay focused. Find more at How meditation can help with stress.
Finally, there is mindfulness meditation which is a way of increasing your acceptance and awareness of living in the present moment not being distracted by the future or the past and you do this by expanding your conscious awareness, which is done by focusing on the flow of your breath, as the Mayo Clinic website explains.
Yoga
Yoga is a way of doing a series of different postures and stretches to help promote a flexible body and a calm mind. The poses used in yoga need to be done with concentration and balance and meditation is a key part to yoga because meditation helps center your body to help perform the yoga stretches that will most benefit you in the long run. Yoga is also a low-impact form of exercise, to there would be no added tension or stress to the body’s joints or muscles, when done under proper supervision to ensure proper postures to avoid harm to your body. Yoga and meditation go hand in hand, with each other because meditation is incorporated to the yoga and is the essential part of yoga.
Tai chi
This is a form of gentle Chinese martial arts. In tai chi (TIE-CHEE), you perform a self-paced series of postures or movements in a slow, graceful manner while practicing deep breathing Find more of the Tai chi story.
Other ways of taking care of yourself when your busy is finding time to to play sports and eat healthy. In order to do so you should be able to manage your time in balancing your work life and your personal life to take care of yourself.
Disclaimer: This website and posts do not constitute or substitute medical advice.
Regenerate Your Body, Mind and Soul !
Launching the Regeneration Program part I
This program is intended to help you manage stress, to learn how to enjoy meal preparation and implement techniques to support a healthier lifestyle aimed to prevent disease, sleep better, and maintain a healthy weight with lots of energy for life!
When
May 14th 10.00 am to 4.00 pm
Where
Aqua Radisson Blu Club Suite
Presenters:
Dr. Cristina Torres-Moore MD(MX), MSOM, LAc. and Sunita Vira, Raw Food Chef & Nutrition Educator founder of the http://rawfoodcenter.com
Price $250 per person, $375 for two.
Early bird by April 30th: $200 one person, $300 for two.
Includes: 3 course-Lunch & Snacks, Recipe Book, Notebook.
RSVP: use code 1605 at https://ipn.intuit.com/pay/IntegralAlternativeMedicineLL
ctorres@integral-clinic.com Phone: 312-631-3095
What you will learn:
- An integrated approach – ancient medicine adapted for present times as a natural way to reach balance within your body.
- Useful practices to implement meaningful changes in your daily routine.
- Practical exercises to start immediately.
- Concepts to renew your cooking vision.
- Hands-on culinary demonstrations.
- An in-depth understanding of nutrition and lifestyle for better health.
- Learn to prepare nutritious meals that are quick & easy.
My nutrition journey
I have been interested in health my entire life, and that is why I chose to become a medical doctor. I believed I would be able to help people recover their health. Some teachers at medical school focused on being a good clinician, indicating that lab tests and others should be used to confirm diagnosis and not the basis for diagnosis or the cause of the malady. They also emphasized the importance of engaging the patient in a healthy lifestyle. Later on, when studying the different areas of medicine I focused on learning how to treat diseases using therapeutic methods such as pharmaceutical products and surgery. My attention went to pharmacology, then to surgery, and so on, and my initial ideas on health recovery was abandoned for a more modern and sophisticated medicine.
Nutrition was not a subject formally taught by the medical faculty, so I made my own research and followed what science was indicating at the time, e.g., keeping the calories count under control according to age and physical activity, not using eggs everyday, avoiding butter and animal fat, etc., and that is what I suggested to my patients at the time. Personally, I went from the low calorie diet to the Atkins diet which I found extreme and dangerous, and so I stayed with the old premises of moderation, eliminating added sugars from my diet and opting for complex carbohydrates instead. I still used the “standard” meals such as boxed cereals, lactose free milk, after I realized that I was lactose intolerant, cheese and lots of meats, as did everyone else around me. I was not obese but my weight was not ideal so I would diet every so often with not much success.
It was not until I authored a school assay on the impact of Chinese diet in western population for my class “Introduction to Chinese Medicine” that I discovered “The China Study” book by Colin Campbell. That book and other publications revealed evidence that the animal protein based western diet was linked to obesity, diabetes and cancer. That study and some other scientific publications shocked me in such a way that I decided to avoid animal products, but I had no success at that time. I did not have the time or energy to make such a radical change, so I gave up and adopted what I considered a more reachable goal – adopting an Asian-like regimen by adding more vegetables to my diet – rice, fish and some chicken, duck and little meat. After finishing my Masters degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine I was able do more research on healthy diets and here is what I have came up so far – a plant based diet is a good way to lose weight, gain energy and most of all help our planet! Another interesting perspective I learned after reading several resources such as the Science article about Impact of meat consumption.
I do not say that the vegan diet is for everyone, since we have different needs and situations.
Disclaimer: This website contains my personal opinion and the result of my readings and does not constitute or substitute medical advice.
Menstrual cramps?
Do you suffer from menstrual cramps
Have you ever questioned if it is “normal” to have menstrual cramps? I never questioned that, I thought it was the way it should be, except for very few “lucky” girls who were the exception!
Now, after many years of using pharmaceutical products for myself to make my life somewhat manageable during menstrual periods, I found that suffering menstrual pain is not “normal”.
According to Chinese Medicine, whenever an obstruction occurs it manifests itself in pain. That is the basics of acupuncture, where the goal is to facilitate the flow of qi (“chee”) within the body.
It is important that your doctor rules out physical diseases that need medical attention, though such as Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, Pelvic Inflammatory disease, Endometriosis, to mention some. When they are ruled out and you want to try a different approach. I can help you to regulate your menstrual periods to make them more regular, with little or no pain using acupuncture and/or Chinese herbal formulas. If you are afraid of needles, we have other pain-free techniques to use.
Schedule your appointment for a free 15-minute consultation to see if we can help.
Magic food?
My Friends share with me a lot of information related to super power food and so you find a lot in the media. Many people rush to increase consumption of such meals, such as cranberries, kale, brocoli, turmeric and so on. What I would like to say is that we should eat a balanced meal as we are directed by our doctors and nutritionists, with a variety of fresh vegetables and fruits. Since I am interested promoting a healthy lifestyle I decided to summarize an interestinc epidemiologic study conducted in Britain. “Mortality in British vegetarians: review and preliminary results from EPIC-Oxford”, published on Am J Clin Nutr 2003;78(suppl):533S–8S they studied a population of over 11000 customers of a healthy food store and made a follow up for several years and the conclusion was that people with healthy nutrition the mortality rate is less than the open population in Great Britain and had less incidence of cancer, coronary disease and diabetes. They also report that there is no difference in the mortality rate between vegetarians and non vegetarians within the same studied group. The bottom-line is that what our grand parents used to say about eating your vegetables is still valid and it is part of what Chinese Medicine recommends. According to Dr. Maoshing Ni’s book the recommended proportion is whole grains 40%, fresh vegetables 40%, fresh fruits 10% and protein 10% (The Tao of Nutrition (2009) SevenStarCommunications Group, 3rd. edition. Los Angeles, CA. 2009)