However, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) may save the day, if you can find a sufficiently skilled practitioner. Not just several thousand years´of clinical experience, but even modern research shows that acupuncture, if performed correctly, will positively affect the brain.

In three recent studies from China, researchers found that acupuncture helps alleviates dementia and cognitive impairment following a stroke.

Acupuncture is also helpful in managing chronic pain that may occur after suffering a stroke.

In one study, researchers from Anhui University of Chinese Medicine followed 60   patients with vascular dementia.

Vascular dementia is a general term for problems with reasoning, planning, judgment, memory and other thought processes caused by brain damage from blocked or reduced blood flow to parts of your brain. Vascular dementia often occurs after a stroke blocks an artery in the brain.

Vascular dementia patients were divided into two groups. The first group received acupuncture with a long needle and the second group got treated with a thinner short needle.

The patients were given acupuncture once per day for five continuous days, followed by weekly treatments during eight weeks.

In the first group — the one that was treated with long needles — 90 percent experienced excellent results.

In the second group — the one that received treatment with shorter, thin needles — 67 percent of the participants were returned to full cognitive functionality.

Both these results were very impressive by western medical standards.

In a second study at Heilongjiang University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, researchers compared the effects between on the one hand a combo of acupuncture and conventional cognitive training and, on the other hand just cognitive training alone in patients with non-dementia vascular cognitive impairment (VCIND).

The group that received both cognitive training and acupuncture experienced significantly greater positive outcomes compared to the group that received only cognitive training.

The results demonstrate that acupuncture is effective in the treatment of VCIND.

In a third study, researchers from Tianjin University of Traditional Medicine compared the common drug nimdopine to acupuncture for the treatment of a condition known as cerebral circulatory insufficiency (CCCI).

Atherosclerosis or stroke can cause cerebral circulatory insufficiency. It results in dizziness, tinnitus, blurred vision, depression, memory impairment and dementia. Like vascular dementia and non-dementia vascular cognitive impairment, cerebral circulatory insufficiency stems from poor circulation to the brain and body.

The patients who received acupuncture had an 88 percent response rate. By comparison, those who received the calcium channel blocker drug nimdopine had a 76 percent response rate.

Another natural weapon in the war against Alzheimer’s

Acupuncture does a lot more than just reduce pain. In fact, a skilled acupuncturist can use it to cure almost anything. It can improve blood flow to the brain, which is important in preventing and reversing certain types of dementia.

At the Lund University Hospital in Sweden, one of Sweden´s largest and best equipped university hospitals, a study was performed on stroke patients in the late 1980s, more than 40 years ago.

As usual, the patients were divided into two groups. One of the groups was treated in the conventional western way, and the other group was given the exact same conventional treatment plus acupuncture treatment.

The outcome was quite spectacular. The group treated with acupuncture was considered cured enough to be sent home after just half the time that the other group needed to be released.

And even though I have no information regarding any measured difference in cognitive and other abilities between the two groups upon release from the hospital, with my personal experience of acupuncture, I am quite convinced that those who received acupuncture were in considerably better shape when they were sent home, than those who did not get acupuncture treatment, in spite of only half the treatment time.

What was measured, was that the reduced treatment time of those treated with acupuncture, could be translated into savings of some $ 20,000 per patient in hospital care costs, in the currency of the late 1980s.

Considering the role money and cost play in our society, one would have thought that the mere fact of saving such a hefty sum and freeing so many hospital beds for so many days, should have made headlines, and should have resulted in always treating stroke patients with acupuncture from then on.

Instead, what happened? – The entire study was buried. By some sort of error, or indiscretion, one of Sweden´s largest newspapers ran a story about it in December 1992, more than 4 years after its conclusion. But after that, not a word was written or heard about it. To this day. Nor was acupuncture ever used again to treat stroke patients in Swedish hospitals.

My personal theory of why this study was performed, only to be buried and forgotten, is this: There had been considerable pressure to introduce acupuncture in western conventional healthcare. The Swedish acupuncture study was performed in the belief that it must yield a negative result, providing sufficient reason to reject the call for acupuncture as a mainstream treatment option. This is of course only a speculation on my part.

On the other hand it should not be too difficult to put the needles in places where they would have no effect, since the needles must be inserted at exactly the correct spot for a specific effect, and if the therapist misses the spot and inserts the needle on the skin where there is no acupuncture point, then no effect is achieved. Cheating in this way would of course require that no knowledgeable acupuncturist was present to check how the treatment was done.

Another possible explanation is that a zealous acupuncture-friendly doctor succeeded in getting the hospital management to approve the study without consulting their de facto Big Pharma bosses. And when these discovered the study and its result, they insisted on burying it, or else….

Are you surprised? – If so, you are still in the dark about what determines the treatments you are allowed to have on your insurance or tax money in western democracies. The short answer is Money. But not cost as such. No, what determines it is how much the pharmaceutical industry, Big Pharma, can make from it. And that usually requires a patent and an approval from the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA).

Big Pharma makes no money from acupuncture. Compare that to the daily cost of the several pharmaceutical drugs administered several times a day to each patient for weeks or months.

That´s why you will never get the benefit of real acupuncture for serious illnesses, which is where it really makes a difference. In order to get rid of any pressure to introduce acupuncture into the mainstream medical arsenal, it has been “approved for certain uses”, limiting its use to superficial physiotherapeutic pain relief. Even though it can be successfully used to treat almost any serious illness, many of which are considered incurable by conventional pharmaceutical medicine, yet expensively treated with ineffective drugs loaded with harmful side effects.

What it means to the patient in far superior and faster treatment results, or what it means to the national cost of treatments, paid by the tax payers, is not taken into account, since the entire medical system was hijacked already a century ago by the pharmaceutical industry, courtesy the Carnegie Foundation, but with the initiative most likely coming from John D. Rockefeller.

And although both the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation are tax exempt under a label of benefic, non-profit foundations, they have worked hard to lay the foundations for the most profitable industry in the world, namely the pharmaceutical industry, brainchild of John D. Rockefeller.

The birth and definition of modern western school medicine is a long story that began with the so called Flexner Report, published in 1910 by the Carnegie Foundation and determining medical education and the practice of medicine in very specific and restricted, even racist terms.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

“The Flexner Report is a book-length landmark report of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexner Report and its aftermath.”

“In 1904, there were 160 MD-granting institutions with more than 28,000 students in the USA.  By 1920, there were only 85 MD-granting institutions, educating only 13,800 students. By 1935, there were only 66 medical schools operating in the US.

Between 1910 and 1935, more than half of all American medical schools merged or closed. The dramatic decline was in some part due to the implementation of the Report’s recommendation that all “proprietary” schools be closed and that medical schools should henceforth all be connected to universities. Of the 66 surviving MD-granting institutions in 1935, 57 were part of a university. An important factor driving the mergers and closures of medical schools was that all state medical boards gradually adopted and enforced the Report’s recommendations. In response to the Report, some schools fired senior faculty members as part of a process of reform and renewal.”

We do need access to the many superior holistic and naturopathic treatments that were uprooted and outlawed by this Rockefeller-Carnegie-Flexner conspiracy. It has left the people of the western “developed” world in a very poor state of health, while the pharmaceutical industry is earning trillions of dollars every year without curing anyone, just superficially masking symptoms.

As if that were not enough, the result of this politically enforced policy is that one of the most common causes of death in economically developed countries has become correctly prescribed and taken, officially approved tests, drugs and treatments.

Yes, really! According to official US statistics, no less. Adding the obvious conclusion that far from all cases of death by medicine could have been registered and acknowledged, the scandal becomes even more spectacular.

Personally, I have no doubt that, delving a little deeper, we would find that our glorified medical science, high-jacked a hundred years ago by Big Pharma, is THE most common cause of death in economically developed western countries. And this without hardly any comment in mainstream media, and no reaction from responsible politicians, as far as I am aware.

On a more positive note, I can report that in Sweden, a D.Sc. in Physics, member of the Swedish Academy of Engineering and former business executive, founded a national society three years ago to promote metabolic health by correct food choices and more access to natural holistic health care.

The reason for his initiative was a cancer diagnosis he got, now many years ago, and his long grisly journey through the only officially approved cancer treatments, that only make the patients worse and, more often than not, outright kill them.

The founder of this society for metabolic health is knowledgeable, intelligent and capable of observation and independent logical thinking, which lead him to seriously question the entire ruling paradigm in mainstream school medicine.

He was also lucky enough to find an independent and brave doctor who put him on a healthy diet and effective natural remedies, which finally cured him. By which the doctor very nearly lost her licence to practice medicine. In spite of – or perhaps because – the fact that her recommendations completely cured her patient who now, at age 77, is in better physical, medical and mental shape than ever before.

Don´t you think it´s high time to demand the reintroduction of a patient/consumer focused healthcare that first aims at prevention, and second at true permanent cures?  –

And promote economical natural remedies that really cure, rather than expensive synthetic chemical drugs that only mask symptoms and cause new problems called “side effects”, often worse than the original ones?