Thursday, January 28, 2010

St. Rita's Medical Center - Reflexology

St. Rita's Medical Center - Reflexology
"The Heart Center at St. Rita's offers open-heart patients reflexology as a complimentary therapy to help speed recovery and reduce discomfort. Reflexology therapy strengthens and supports the body's own healing process. The therapy, a safe non-invasive health practice, applies the principle that reflex areas in the feet and hands correspond to all parts of the body, including glands, organs and total body systems. Stimulating these reflexes can help many health problems in a natural way. The act of applying pressure to reflex areas results in the reduction of stress, which promotes positive changes in the body. It can be used to restore and maintain the body's natural equilibrium and encourage healing."

People are always asking me if reflexology is making progress into the medical system. This is progress. They also conducted a study.

"St. Rita's conducted a three-month pilot study on open-heart patients who received reflexology, and the study confirmed a patient's level of pain and anxiety decreased significantly. It also helped patients increase the distance they were able to walk, decreased the number of days they were hospitalized and the amount of medication administered during their recovery process."

Dr. Oz has used reflexology with his heart failure patients for years. He mentioned it on Oprah.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Complete Reflexology for Life




"Kevin, I finally bought you Complete Reflexology for Life book last night just before working at the student clinic on my Auricular Reflexology practicum and it's such a FABULOUS BOOK - love the 10 Minute hand-relaxer workout!

I love all of the pictures and self help with the golf ball - just everything. Thank you! Get this book - full of invaluable information!" Lehsa



When we wrote Complete Reflexology for Life we added a series of techniques to quickly loosen the feet and hands. I just finished a session with a massage therapist who thought they were great. They only take a few moments but the effects are lasting.


In our book Practitioner's Guide to Reflexology (1985) we put out this series of techniques we called "Stride Replication". The theory was that you could replicate some of the signals necessary for stride in a way that would relax the feet very quickly. 


The book came out during the merger of Prentice Hall and Simon and Schuster and was murdered in the process. 


Unfortunately these techniques lay dormant for quite awhile. But they are very effective in quickly loosening the feet and hands. Like "dessert techniques" they act globally on the whole foot not targeting specific reflex areas. Yet it helps the overall relaxation response and it prepares the foot or hand for more effective technique application. 


Thank you for paying attention to these techniques, Lehsa. After 15 years it is nice to see them get some recognition. 



Kevin Kunz







Monday, January 25, 2010

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Med Students Say Conventional Medicine Would Benefit By Integrating Alternative Therapies

© lovleah  photo from BigStockPhoto.com


Med Students Say Conventional Medicine Would Benefit By Integrating Alternative Therapies

"In the largest national survey of its kind, researchers from UCLA and UC San Diego measured medical students' attitudes and beliefs about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and found that three-quarters of them felt conventional Western medicine would benefit by integrating more CAM therapies and ideas."


Wow the times they are a changing. 3/4 of the students? That means a strong majority of med students believe this. What will that mean in the future? What do you think? 


Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Ebooks offering idea

I am thinking of offering ebooks in a whole new way. Make it a client self help library for the practitioner. So if a client comes in you can give them self help homework just by printing them out. Remember you can print them out as long as you don't sell them or change them. What do you think?

http;//www.reflexology-research.com/ebooks.html

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Can reflexology help children?


Stories about reflexology and children always seem to bring a smile. Who can help it when imagining this scene: a five year-old on the way to a birthday party insisting that his parents drive back home so he could retrieve HIS golf ball. This self-sufficient young one had learned that he could control his migraine headaches with a reflexology golf ball technique he’d learned at the baby-sitter’s. (The baby-sitter’s friend, a client of ours, had passed on the technique we’d shown him and that he found to be successful for his sinus headaches.) The parents were surprised to learn that their son was having headaches as well as that he was using a golf ball for a purpose.

There’s so much to smile about here but also so much to wonder at with the serendipity of it all. This little boy lived in Dallas, some 650 miles from us. The original client lived in Lubbock, Texas some 200 miles from Dallas. Who knew that a bowl of golf balls and an adult using one for a health purpose could help a child—little mimics that they all are—with a health concern unknown to his parents? (This is not so unusual. Children often don’t know how to express such things.) It’s a reminder to us all that our reflexology activities have many and unknown results.

Looking over other stories and research studies, I am reminded of the role of reflexology in helping both a child, suffering from a health concern, and a parent, suffering from concern about the child’s concern. One study showed that crying time for colicy infants was reduced from 90 minutes a day to 30 minutes with reflexology. Another showed that enuresis (involuntary urination or bed wetting) was lessened and still another that encopresis (fecal incontinence) was helped. Then there are the newspaper reports about chronic ear infections, a very painful experience, are helped with reflexology.

Medicine itself offers scant help for any of these common childhood health concerns.  One can image coping with these scenes without the help of reflexology: loss of sleep, messy situations and problems with seemingly no solution. In addition, frequently it’s not easy to see that a child to be physically uncomfortable or what’s causing it. For these reasons—as well as the sheer pleasure of spending some quality time with a little one—reflexology and children can bring much more than a smile.



Barbara Kunz


Parent's Guide to Reflexology



Thursday, January 7, 2010

Nursing and Reflexology Research Part 2

Sixty-two studies by nurses illustrate the uses, doses and value of reflexology application
• One nurse-researcher notes: “Foot reflexology is a way to enhance the nurse-patient interrelationship. It offers a strategy to fulfill the goals for human touch and holistic nursing care. It can be performed at any location, is non-invasive, and does not interfere with patients’ privacy.”
• 10 minutes of hand reflexology work was found to be effective in providing: significant pain relief for post operative patients, improvement in feeling, an increase in skin temperature and a high rating for nurse-patient relationship.
• 10-minute hand reflexology sessions over 5 days helped cancer patients with: significantly lower degrees of fatigue and anxiety; improved mood states and lower systolic blood pressure and pulse rate.
• A series of 10-minute hand reflexology sessions over 5 days for 5 weeks with hemodialysis patients demonstrated significant improvements in four measures of kidney functioning. In addition, patients experienced significant increases in vigor, mood, uplifts and self care agency.
• For menopausal women, reflexology work lessened symptoms.
• Foot reflexology makes a real time, right now difference for cancer patients, easing pain and anxiety following a ten-minute session in one study and a thirty-minute session in another.
• Sixteen studies from seven countries demonstrate that reflexology helps cancer patients with: nausea, vomiting, fatigue, pain, and anxiety as well as providing relaxation.
• In separate studies of reflexology, middle-aged women showed: reduced urinary incontinence; reduced depression and stress responses, and strengthened the immune systems; reduced perceived stress and fatigue and helped blood circulation; and relieved pain and depression for those with osteoarthritis.
• In separate studies of postpartum women, reflexology was shown to significantly decrease depression and improve sleep quality as well as gastrointestinal function.
• Separate studies found that elderly women were helped with reflexology: a self-help program lowered depression; reflexology work decreased blood pressure and fatigue as well as helped with sleep and fatigue.
• A hospice program found reflexology (and other complementary therapies) “offer(ed) a voluntary, non-invasive and holistic opportunity for patients to experience increased comfort and relaxation in the midst of their treatment experience.”
• An end-of-life program found that reflexology applied by family members had a beneficial effect on the morale of both cancer patients and their families.
• Research “supports the use of reflexology in nursing home residents with mild/moderate dementia with results demonstrating a significant decrease in symptoms of pain, depression and physiologic measures of stress.”

Evidenced-based reflexology information: research shows how much and how long to apply reflexology to create positive effects.



Barbara Kunz 


More Information




Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Nursing and Reflexology Research

Touch has always been a part of the nursing mandate and reflexology has become a part of this reach out to patients. The causal use of reflexology by nurses has now been explored through research, creating an evidence base for its uses.

The use of reflexology by nurses is easy and practical as noted by one nurse researcher who writes: “Foot reflexology is a way to enhance the nurse-patient interrelationship. It offers a strategy to fulfill the goals for human touch and holistic nursing care. It can be performed at any location, is non-invasive, and does not interfere with patients’ privacy.”


The following abstracts of sixty-two studies by nurses illustrate the uses, doses and value of reflexology application. For example, research shows benefits of 10 minutes hand reflexology applications: a single application provides post-operative pain relief; a 5-day series helps cancer patients and a 5-day per week/5 weeks course of treatment improves kidney function for dialysis patients. Whether applied as hand reflexology or foot reflexology or taught for partner use, research shows reflexology to be a useful adjunct for nursing.



Barbara Kunz


More Information




Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Can Reflexology Help Me? Answers From Research

Just finished a widget on Can Reflexology Help Me? Answers From Research.

You can put it on your webpage, blog or Facebook or MySpace page. It is in the right hand column of this blog and based on materials from Reflexology Research Documents.

And the best part is it is free.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Barefoot Running and Ground Awareness

Barefoot Running | Parade.com

This is a great article on barefoot running by Christopher McDougall. Well worth you giving it a perusal.

What struck me about this article are two things. First the article talks about "ground awareness". We talk about body awareness but we don't really talk about our body's awareness of the ground. Yet this is a critical element in survival. It requires an integrated responses from our whole body. Or we fall down. With the elderly as I have said in other blogs this can have devastating consequences.

Ground awareness is a really great concept and points out the importance of pressure to the bottom of the feet.

Next the article talks about the elasticity of our legs and their reflexive response to changing surface.

"Our legs are thickly woven with rubbery, elastic tendons that absorb shock and also use it as free energy, like a rubber ball ricocheting off pavement. "If you encase the foot in thick shoes, you not only lose ground awareness, you limit natural elasticity," says Robert Schleip of the Fascia Research Center at Germany's University of Ulm. According to a study published in The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness in March, barefoot runners experienced significantly less impact than runners in shoes."


Are our receptors "jammed" because of shoe wear? Can we unjam these sensors? Barefoot running seems to be able to do it in about 30 minutes so that running on any surface is not only possible but a pleasure to do.



Kevin Kunz

http://www.reflexology-research.com 
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