Barefoot Doctor's Journal

Take control of your health with this guide to natural health and healing. Get expert advice to help you alleviate pain and live healthy naturally. Access to tools, information and opportunities.

Take control of your health

For 5000 years Traditional Chinese Medicine has help people to relieve pain and achieve a healthy longevity naturally.

A comprehensive guide to natural health and healing, the Barefoot Doctor’s Journal seeks to empower it's readers to take control of their own health, find their own inspiration, help create healthier communities and share the adventure with whoever is interested. Internationally recognized experts in the fields of healthy aging and Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Living Younger Longer Institute has helped hundreds of people each year to live healthy naturally.

News You Can Use!

Providing members with the latest scientific research on the ancient healing secrets of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Get information, access to tools, and enjoyable opportunities for a lifetime of active adventure!

June 14, 2021
Joe Brady

Low Back Pain Relief

Research has shown that several mind and body practices, including acupuncture, mindfulness-based stress reduction, progressive muscle relaxation, spinal manipulation, tai chi, and yoga, may be helpful for chronic low-back pain.

These practices are generally considered safe when used appropriately. However, that doesn’t mean they are risk-free for everyone, choose a well-qualified instructor and use your head.

Low-back pain is a very common problem in the United States and around the world. About 80 percent of adults have low-back pain at some point in their lives. It’s the most common cause of job-related disability and a leading contributor to missed workdays and visits to physicians.

Most episodes of low-back pain last only a short period of time. Health professionals call this acute low-back pain. Acute low-back pain is often defined as pain that lasts for up to 4 weeks. In most cases, acute low-back pain goes away without causing any lasting problems.

Low-back pain that lasts for between 4 and 12 weeks is called subacute. If low-back pain lasts for 12 weeks or longer, it’s called chronic. Treatment sometimes relieves chronic low-back pain successfully, but in other cases, pain persists despite treatment.

Clinical guidelines encourage alternatives

The American College of Physicians issued a clinical practice guideline for the treatment of low-back pain in 2017. The guideline recommends that health care providers and patients use non-drug treatments as first-line therapy for chronic low-back pain. It also recommends the use of nondrug approaches for acute low-back pain, with or without drug therapy. Several complementary health approaches are among the treatment options suggested for acute low-back pain, chronic low-back pain, or both.

Read more about what science say’s about it

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June 8, 2021
Joe Brady

Change Your Brain by Transforming Your Mind

Join us as Dr. Richard J. Davidson examines recent scientific research on the neuroscience of positive psychology and the effect of mindful meditation practices that strengthen the positive aspects of human psychology. Comparisons of different types of meditation practices have been shown to have various effects on the health of both mind and body. Dr. Davidson explores the four constituents of well-being that have been researched and describes how they can be influenced by the practice of meditation and improve physical health in both experienced and beginner meditators. New research also shows that meditation-based interventions delivered online can produce behavioral and neural changes. Research has shown that meditation influences key brain systems important for emotion regulation and attention. Dr. Davidson will review the ways in which different forms of meditation might change the specific brain and behavioral systems. Collectively, this research indicates that we can cultivate adaptive neural changes and strengthen positive human qualities through systematic mental practice.

About the speaker

Richard J. Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center.

View Lecture

This lecture has been broken into eleven chapters and may be viewed by clicking on the links provided, beginning with

Introduction to Change Your Brain by Transforming Your Mind.

Speaker Biosketch for Change Your Brain by Transforming Your Mind ›

June 2, 2021
Joe Brady

The Science of Music

Since ancient times Chinese medicine has believed that music has the power to soothe the soul in ways that other forms of medicine simply cannot. In fact, the ancient Chinese characters for happiness, music, and medicine are almost identical. Scientists today are confirming what the ancients have said about music when it comes to treating anxiety and mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder, some of the most common mental health problems in today’s world.

Especially after the pandemic and economic collapse of the past 18 months, mental health problems are increasingly common. In the United States, they affect about one-fourth of adults in any given year and nearly half of adults at some time during their lives. According to the World Health Organization, mental illnesses account for more disability in developed countries than any other group of illnesses. 

Much current research and several major research initiatives are underway to further this fascinating line of research and promise to provide doctors in the future with a whole new set of tools that go way beyond drugs and surgery.

Read more about the latest research initiatives at NIH

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May 24, 2021
Joe Brady

Whole-Person Health

In classical Chinese medicine, the whole is always more than just the sum of the parts. There is more to human health than the absence of disease. The health of an individual also depends upon the community in which they live, it includes diet and exercise, it includes their leisure activities as well as relationships they have. The health of the community and environment cannot be separated from the health of the individual. In science, this is known as the cybernetic hierarchy in biological systems. No component of the pattern can be isolated, our health is dependent upon the totality of the way we live our lives on a daily basis. With advances in information technology and artificial intelligence, we can now study human health in all of its complexities and national research organizations are beginning to address this with new strategic approaches to the study of whole-person health.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) was originally created to facilitate the study and evaluation of complementary therapies. Over time, NCCAM became NCCIH and was designed to focus on integrative health research, with the goals of improving care, promoting health, and preventing disease. With this new strategic plan “Whole Person Health: Mapping a Strategic Vision for NCCIH”, the center is expanding the definition of integrative health to include whole-person health, empowering individuals, families, communities, and populations to improve their health in the biological, behavioral, social, and environmental domains. Our own research on whole-person health at the University of Denver will support promoting and restoring health with complementary and integrative health approaches.

Read more about the research and watch the video

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May 10, 2021
Joe Brady

Making Science Work in the Community

When research shows that a health intervention works, you might think that health care providers and patients would start using it right away. But that may not happen. It can take years before research evidence is incorporated into clinical practice.

Over the last 20 years, a growing body of evidence suggests that some complementary approaches, such as acupuncture, hypnosis, massage, mindfulness meditation, spinal manipulation, tai chi, and yoga, may help to manage many types of health conditions including in the treatment of pain. Integrative health care often brings conventional and complementary approaches together in a coordinated way. It emphasizes a holistic, patient-focused approach to health care and wellness—often including mental, emotional, functional, spiritual, social, and community aspects—and treating the whole person rather than, for example, one organ system.

The use of integrative approaches to health and wellness has grown within care settings across the United States. Researchers are currently exploring the potential benefits of integrative health in a variety of situations, including pain management for military personnel and veterans, relief of symptoms in cancer patients and survivors, and programs to promote healthy behaviors.

Researchers have assumed that complementary and integrative therapies proven effective would be readily adopted and implemented in the community. This is turning out to be more difficult and compelling evidence is showing that there is a long way between science demonstrating the effectiveness of therapy and its implementation in the community. Even when interventions have been tested in the community, the development of the public education needed to support their broader use is lacking. In the context of complementary health approaches, for example, there is much evidence to support the efficacy and effectiveness of acupuncture for chronic low-back pain, and guidelines from the American College of Physicians recommend acupuncture as a first-line treatment for pain; however, there is very limited utilization or referrals in conventional health care settings for using acupuncture to treat pain. Providing the funding and training and resources need to implement any programs like exercise, meditation, yoga, tai chi, qigong, and a hundred other healthy lifestyle activities are very difficult to come by. Competing with large-scale pharmaceutical companies who can afford multi-million dollar ad campaigns for opioids, for example, is just not possible for your lowly little tai chi or yoga instructor no matter if a hundred studies show they are more effective for treating pain. 

To answer this problem many researchers have taken to a new area of scientific inquiry called implementation science. Implementation science is the study of strategies to make effective use of evidence-based health programs in community settings to improve the health of the population. The field of implementation science focuses on closing the gap between evidence and practice. Researchers in this field seek to understand the strategies and processes used to implement interventions, the barriers and facilitators to change, and how they vary in different contexts.

Community Med School Research at the University of Denver

In the research we are conducting for the University of Denver we are using an implementation science method called the RE-AIM model. To help program planners, evaluators, funders, and policymakers plan evaluate, and implement health programs in real-world settings, psychologist Russell E. Glasgow, Ph.D., and his colleagues developed a conceptual framework called RE-AIM. Initially created to evaluate interventions in health behavior, RE-AIM also serves as a helpful planning tool for a whole range of programs and policies in health promotion. 

The RE-AIM model (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance) is a comprehensive framework for program planning and implementation in the community.

  • Reach refers to the program’s ability to reach those who can benefit from the program
  • Effectiveness is the benefits the program provides participants,
  • Adoption is the use of community partnerships to amplify the reach of the program
  • Implementation is how well the program is implemented
  • Maintenance is can the program be self-sustaining.

To participate in the study

If you have already filled out a survey for the study the next round will be sent out by the end of this month. If you are currently not a participant in the study and wish to participate contact Joseph Brady the principal investigator for the study at Joseph.brady@du.edu

Read more including a new paper in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, written by four scientists from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, takes a close look at implementation science methodologies and how they apply to complementary and integrative health research. The full text of the paper is available for free.

Implementation Science Methodologies for Complementary and Integrative Health Research

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