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In her amazing TED talk from 2008, Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who trained at Harvard University, tells the powerful and emotional story of her stroke and what it felt like. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment.
As this scientist talks about the energy all around us, one of the fundamental principles behind the practice of Jin Shin Jyutsu and other energy healing modalities, I hope some of the skeptics might start to consider it as reality. In the words of Bolte Taylor: “I am an energy being, connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right [brain] hemisphere. We are energy beings, connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family.”
With Jin Shin Jyutsu becoming more widely known in the medical community at large, A Touching Good-Bye is filling a big gap, as much for the general public as for practitioners: how to help people in times of critical illness and death. Judith B. Andry recognized that there is a need for finding out what you can do, and how you can help your loved one when they are getting ready to depart. Her book offers rich accounts of her own and many other practitioners’ and students’ experiences, told in first person. It is empowering and soothing for the caregiver to be able to do something helpful, to alleviate pain and fears, and to improve someone’s quality of life in the latter stages of life.
Through A Touching Good-Bye, anyone can learn simple, yet powerful tools to bring calmness, consolation, and peace, and the giver will benefit in many ways as well as the receiver. There are detailed instructions and illustrations. While many of the stories in the book do end in death and Jin Shin Jyutsu can’t offer an escape from the inevitable, those who do choose to make use of this art find either peace, calmness, reduced pain and agitation, improved sleep, serenity, and improved energy, or all of the above. We have nothing to lose in trying it, and so much to gain. But we have to go ahead and have the courage to do so.
As previously mentioned on this site, the Markey Cancer Center at the University of Kentucky has been offering Jin Shin Jyutsu (JSJ) free to its patients. This has been made possible through a grant from the Lexington Cancer Foundation. In this video, several doctors are commenting on the benefits they have seen in their patients, and how they themselves went from being curious to becoming believers in Jin Shin Jyutsu. Pactitioner Jennifer Bradley treats patients in a special therapy room or in their chair in the chemotherapy clinic. Research data from more than 450 sessions with 159 cancer patients revealed that all of these patients reported a decrease in stress, pain and nausea levels after JSJ.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99nrmCufq_c&rel=0
Produced by Research Communications at the University of Kentucky.
As massage therapy and Jin Shin Jyutsu are gaining more recognition in the medical field, an increasing number of hospitals are looking for qualified massage therapists as savvy health care consumers are requesting massage therapy to deal with certain health conditions.
According to the latest American Massage Therapy Association (AMTA) industry facts, almost 10 percent more people received massage for a medical or health reason. Forty-four percent of adult Americans surveyed who had a massage between July 2010 and July 2011, received it for medical or health reasons as compared to 35 percent the previous year. Of the people surveyed who had a least one massage in the last five years, 40 percent reported that they did so for health conditions such as pain management, injury rehabilitation, chronic pain management or overall wellness. As more people–especially baby boomers–request these services, and have the discretionary income to pay for them, hospitals and other health care providers are taking notice and making changes to the services they offer.
As mentioned previously on this blog, Jin Shin Jyutsu is being offered by several of the nation’s top hospitals and facilities such as The Kentucky Markey Center (Lexington, KY), the Memorial Hospital (Morristown, NJ), the California Pacific Medical Center (San Francisco, CA) , and the Kaiser Permanente Northwest Center for Health Research (Portland, OR) .
This study, conducted by Kristina McFadden and Theresa Hernandez of the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado at Boulder, investigated the effects of Jin Shin Jyutsu on cardiovascular function in stroke survivors, a population that could especially benefit from a treatment promoting cardiovascular health. The study tested the hypothesis that active acupressure (Jin Shin Jyutsu) treatments would reduce heart rate and blood pressure (i.e., induce a greater relaxation response) above and beyond that seen during placebo acupressure treatments.
Methods: A randomised, placebo-controlled, single-blind crossover design was utilised, in which 16 participants received 8 weeks of either active or placebo acupressure followed by washout and crossover into the opposite treatment condition. Heart rate and blood pressure measurements were taken throughout treatments.
Results: Active acupressure treatments were associated with a significantly greater and faster reduction in heart rate compared to that seen during placebo treatments. No treatment effect on blood pressure was found.
Conclusions: Active acupressure reduced heart rate significantly more than did placebo acupressure during treatments. Although no treatment effect on blood pressure was found, this could be due to 67% of participants taking antihypertensive medications during the study.
The study also concluded that the data suggests that Jin Shin Jyutsu “warrants further study as a possible adjunct treatment for stroke survivors. This is especially important given acupressure’s potential as a self-sustaining treatment tool that, once learned, can be used independently”.
The study was published in Elsevier’s Complementary Therapies in Medicine Journal (2010) 18, 42—48.
Chair massage is particularly suited for corporate events, at your office, for employee wellness programs, and so forth. Contact me to schedule chair massage for your organization! This study utilized chair massage, thereby proving the point that getting regular massage is more important than which kind of massage, or for how long:
Twenty-six adults were given a chair massage and 24 control group adults were asked to relax in the massage chair for 15 minutes, two times per week for five weeks. On the first and last days of the study they were monitored for EEG, before, during and after the sessions. In addition, before and after the sessions they performed math computations, they completed POMS Depression and State Anxiety Scales and they provided a saliva sample for cortisol. At the beginning of the sessions they completed Life Events, Job Stress and Chronic POMS Depression Scales. Group by repeated measures and post hoc analyses revealed the following:
frontal delta power increased for both groups, suggesting relaxation;
the massage group showed decreased frontal alpha and beta power (suggesting enhanced alertness); while the control group showed increased alpha and beta power;
the massage group showed increased speed and accuracy on math computations while the control group did not change;
anxiety levels were lower following the massage but not the control sessions, although mood state was less depressed following both the massage and control sessions;
salivary cortisol levels were lower following the massage but not the control sessions but only on the first day; and
at the end of the 5 week period depression scores were lower for both groups but job stress score were lower only for the massage group.
Massage therapy is commonly used during physical rehabilitation of skeletal muscle to ameliorate pain and promote recovery from injury. Although there is evidence that massage may relieve pain in injured muscle, how massage affects cellular function remains unknown.
However, the results of research involving massage at McMastersUniversity in Canada were published in the February 1 issue of Science Translational Medicine[1], and they are quite revealing. A group of young participants exercised for 70 minutes to exhaustion, thus experiencing exercise-induced muscle damage.
After just 10 minutes of massage to one of the legs there was decreased muscle tissue inflammation in the muscle, as compared to the other leg that didn’t receive massage.
Researchers found that massage not only reduced the production of cytokine, a compound involved with inflammation, but at the same time provoked mitochondrial biogenesis, leading to enhanced cell function and repair that helps muscles adapt to the demands of increased exercise.
Dr. Mark A. Tarnopolsky, senior author of the study said: “With massage, you can have your cake and eat it, too – massage can suppress inflammation and actually enhance cell recovery.”
Here is co-researcher Simon Melov, a molecular biologist at the Buck Institute:
http://vimeo.com/36032791
[1] Crane JD, Ogborn DI, Cupido C, Melov S, Hubbard A, Bourgeois JM and Tarnopolsky MA. Massage Therapy Attenuates Inflammatory Signaling After Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage. Sci Transl Med 4, 119ra13 (2012).
Let’s put the “Health” back in Health Care! Oregon’s Governor John Kitzhaber, a Democrat and a former emergency room doctor, has convinced the federal government that he has a way to make Medicaid treatment better, and cheaper, by completely changing the way the sickest people in Oregon get health care, NPR’s All Things Considered reported back on May 30th.
Under the current system, hospitals and doctors don’t have a financial incentive to make people better. Quite the opposite: If a patient keeps coming back, they keep getting paid. But under the new system, the quicker a patient gets better, the more money the coordinated care organization can keep. Kitzhaber believes that over the next five years, Oregon will be able to save the feds every penny of the $2 billion the state’s been promised.
“We estimated that if every state Medicaid program in the country were to adopt this model, the net savings would be about $1.5 trillion over 10 years,” he said.
Oregon’s new system needs to show cuts to Medicaid spending by 2 percent next year, otherwise all this new money could very well dry up.
“Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity can cause to be set in motion.
Be outrageous in forgiving. Be dramatic in reconciling. Mistakes? Back up and make them as right as you can, then move on. Be off the charts in kindness. In whatever you are called to, strive to be devoted to it in all aspects large and small. Fall short? Try again. Mastery is made in increments, not in leaps. Be brave, be fierce, be visionary. Mend the parts of the world that are ‘within your reach.’
To strive to live this way is the most dramatic gift you can ever give to the world. Consider yourselves assigned.”
This results of this 2011 study by the University of Colorado Boulder, involving 38 study subjects, indicate a link between the Jin Shin Jyutsu treatments and enhanced cognitive function in study subjects with mild traumatic brain injury, or TBI.
“We found that the study subjects with mild traumatic brain injury who were treated with acupressure showed improved cognitive function, scoring significantly better on tests of working memory when compared to the TBI subjects in the placebo control group,” said CU-Boulder Professor Theresa Hernandez, lead study author.
The study subjects, each of whom was randomly assigned to one of two groups — an experimental group that received active acupressure treatments from trained experts, and a control group that received treatments from the same experts on places on the body that are not considered to be acupressure points, acting as a placebo. The study was “blinded,” meaning the researchers collecting data and the study participants themselves did not know who was in the experimental group or the placebo group until the end of the study.
“We were looking at synchronized neural activity in response to a stimulus, and our data suggest the brains of those in the active acupressure group responded differently when compared to those in the placebo acupressure group,” Hernandez said.
A paper on the subject was published in the January 2011 issue of the Journal of Neurotrauma, a peer-reviewed publication on the latest advances in both clinical and laboratory investigations of traumatic brain and spinal cord injury.
In a 2010 stroke study led by Hernandez, the researchers concluded that Jin Shin Jyutsu triggered a larger and faster relaxation response during active treatments and a decreased stress response following active treatments compared with what was seen in placebo treatments. Hernandez and her colleagues are embarking on a new study on the use of Jin Shin Jyutsu in athletes to see if the enhanced relaxation response and decreased stress seen in the stroke study can reduce the likelihood of athletic injury.
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