Traditional Chinese Medicine

I am reading an interesting article: TREATMENT OF GLAUCOMA WITH CHINESE HERBS by Subhuti Dharmananda, Ph.D., Director, Institute for Traditional Medicine, Portland, Oregon

The article quotes the recent compendium English-Chinese Encyclopedia of Practical Traditional Chinese Medicine (4), in which Volume 17 is devoted to ophthalmology. As to cause of open-angle glaucoma, it says:

Emotional depression of a person may cause stagnation of liver qi that will turn into fire. When the fire goes upward to attack the eyes, the disease occurs. Or, if a person suffers from retention of dampness due to hypofunction of the spleen, phlegm will originate from the retention and form phlegm stagnation which will further convert into fire. When the fire moves upward to attack the eye, the disease is caused. Besides, deficiency of the liver and kidney, a condition called consumption of primordial yin, will result in asthenic fire, and attack of the eye by the fire will lead to the disease.

Eşref Armağan is a blind painter of Turkish origin according to Wikipedia.

A person participating in our self-tonometry research sent me the following YouTube link this morning. It is worth taking a few minutes to watch!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3AgO6H0H98&eurl=http://widget- 

To quickly verify the validity of the video, I checked a few other links. Here they are:

Over the last year I have been telling my friends and my wife that I'm finding enlightenment though high-frequency intraocular pressure research and self-tonometry. For a while my wife watched me monitor my intraocular pressure up to one hundred times a day (or even two hundred) and she thought I was focused on glaucoma and the disease. My wife understands The Great Secret and The Law of Attraction and naturally she was concerned - she didn't want me focusing on disease.

Today the following email arrived in my inbox via a post to a glaucoma support group. This email gives me an opportunity to answer some questions, including the original of the name of my (former) blog, The IOP Querent.

 New research presented at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) annual meeting last week revealed that acupuncture can dramatically reduce eye pressure (intraocular pressure). The study, titled Electro-acupuncture to decrease intraocular pressure in Rhesus monkeys with chronic glaucoma, was performed by scientists at the College of Veterinary Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. Dr. Cantwell was the lead researcher and she was at ARVO to present the results.