Alternative Medicine

With a growing number of college campus shootings, it’s no surprise that some professors are feeling uneasy.  Others are coming up with some ways to limit firearm access without violating the Second Amendment.

As a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Beth McMurtrie spends a lot of time talking to professors, and lately she finds they’re feeling angry and anxious.

People with chronic diseases are always looking for new ways to relieve their symptoms and possibly find a cure.  And more patients are turning to functional medicine to find new avenues for treatment.  While there are several such clinics operating in Central and Northern Virginia, a new medical practice is opening in Southwestern Virginia that focuses on the whole patient.

This week, the University of Virginia’s nursing school will begin an ambitious educational effort -- training more than four dozen nurses in how to talk about death with patients and their families and how to provide comfortable care to people who are dying. 

You might expect nurses to be experts on the end of life, but UVA’s Associate Dean of Nursing Ken White, says that’s not always the case. He’s been studying what nurses know for more than a decade.

When people hear about the “Blue Ridge Center for Chinese Medicine” in Floyd County, they sometimes look surprised and ask, “What’s that doing here? Not only is it serving a local clientele, it’s also working to create a network of farmers raising certified traditional Chinese herbs to supply a growing sector in health care.
 

More Americans than ever before are turning to Oriental Medicine and Acupuncture to heal and prevent disease.  Many states, including Virginia now license practitioners and regulate the industry.

As the sector grows, there is more demand for Chinese Medicinal herbs, an important aspect of the practice. A new project underway to grow Chinese medicinal herbs here is taking root in Floyd Virginia.  

“The ones at the top are the ones we can grow at the clinic here but most of these are sourced from China and the west coast,” says David Grimsley.