Asthma: Snippets from my Shiatsu Thesis (1)

I was given the course outline for year 3 in September 2006, I didn’t have any ideas about what I would base my written project on. There are so many interesting areas that Traditional Chinese Medicine and Shiatsu can lead you to, my head was reeling at this point with different directions to take.

I then started thinking about areas that interested me.

Do I look at something that I was working on with a client, to give me a better understanding of what was going on with them? It would help with that client and potentially others that followed but would it keep my interest through the research project process and would I be able to get other clients with similar dis-ease to use as case studies? 

I then turned my attention to Asthma, I was diagnosed with Asthma in my early 20’s and believed that I had late onset Asthma. However, having reviewed this during the research project my views in relation to this have been turned on their head .Needless to say the revelations resulted in the change of focus from late onset to Early on set Asthma which also tied in with my case study.  

Asthma affects over 300 million people in the world, that relates to one in every 12 Adults and one in every 8 children in the UK , well over 5 million people.

“In terms of their overall health and how much peoples daily lives are affected, asthma is a more important long-term health problem than diabetes. And asthma is a killer – at least a thousand people die from asthma every single year in the UK”(Roberts,p34).

The word asthma comes from Greek and means to breath hard. There are two main types of Asthma, Atopic and Intrinsic. Atopic asthma starts in childhood and young males statistically are more susceptible to this form. Intrinsic asthma starts in Adulthood and women statistically are affected more by this type. The skin dis-ease eczema is also known to be connected to asthma.

This study will focus on Atopic asthma and will not explore Intrinsic asthma or eczema.

 “Asthma has Increased in western countries in the last decade despite new drugs to treat it”. (Maciocia, 1994)

 I’ve decided to include acupuncture in this section because there has been substantially more research conducted using acupuncture compared to Shiatsu. I believe the research into acupuncture bears relevance to Shiatsu because they share the same diagnostic principles, tsubo points and meridians.

I found the following papers on acupuncture and asthma:

 

• “ In a study conducted at the Department of Anaethesia and Intensive care in the University Hospital of Vienna, it revealed that over 70% of patients with long-standing asthma reported a significant improvement of their ailments after ten weeks of acupuncture treatment.”

(http://www.internethealthlibrary.com/Health-problems/Asthma%20- %20researchAltTherapies.htm#Acupuncture)

 

• “Patients with clinically stable, chronic obstructive asthma experienced clinically significant improvements in quality of life when their standard care was supplemented with acupuncture or acupressure”. (http://www.shiatsu.org/public/downloads_public/Shiatsu%20and%20Asthma.pdf)

 

• “Based on a small number of randomised, double-blind trials, acupuncture is not effective for the treatment of asthma or asthma-like symptoms. None of the studies produced statistically significant results for acupuncture for the main outcome measures of lung function. For the other outcomes, studies were generally negative, with few positive outcomes.” http://www.jr2.ox.ac.uk/bandolier/booth/alternat/AT002.html

 

As we can see the research projects conducted so far into acupuncture and asthma have mixed findings. However, the majority found that individuals who received acupuncture treatments significantly improved the quality of the individuals life and reduced the symptoms of asthma.

I believe the first two studies hold true and that the third one although relevant and informative was as it states on a small scale. I feel that it may be floored and bias due to it being made up from a number of small trials. The report goes on to explain that the paper was written and based on other peoples research and results. Therefore I am going to discount this paper and state that I believe the research shows that acupuncture is successful with Asthma and therefore future research conducted into Shiatsu should yield similar results.