Could Cobra Venom Replace Opioids in Treating Chronic Pain?
The King Cobra’s bite can kill you within 30 minutes, however, the same substance has also been developed into a drug that can ease chronic pain that even the strongest synthetic painkillers can’t touch. And today, along with venoms from an array of other creatures, cobra venom is showing great promise in the fight against a number of deadly diseases.
People have used venoms as medicines for thousands of years; Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and homeopathy, and other traditional systems of medicines have all recognized the potency of venoms and used them to treat pain, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, and more. Western medicine got involved in the early 1980s, when the first venom-derived drug Captopril, was approved by the FDA for use in hypertension. Today, there’s been a resurgence of interest among researchers and the pharmaceutical industry owing to advances in the study of these compounds.
The most recent study out of Florida Atlantic University shows the potential of cone snail venom in treating severe malaria.
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Simple Tapping Technique Found to Lower Stress, Boost Immunity
In the latest research on emerging energy healing techniques, one modality is quickly proving itself to be unusually effective in bringing about immediate psychological relief and is done with just the tap of a finger.
Emotional Freedom Techniques — or EFT — are a powerful self-healing practice that seeks to address psychological issues by working with energy channels in the body. Also known as tapping, it combines modern psychological therapies with ancient healing technology.
Specifically, EFT incorporates the principles of acupressure, which involves the application of pressure to specific points in the body — thought for thousands of years to clear blockages along energy channels or meridians.
Dr. Dawson Church is a health and science writer who has been researching, practicing, and teaching EFT for decades.
“EFT’s history goes back thousands of years. Researchers have discovered mummies from Europe that are over 5,000 years old with these tapping points tattooed on their bodies. And acupressure is simply pressure on acupuncture points like we would normally use needling on them. Instead, we use pressure or fingertip tapping on those points.,” Dr. Church said.
“What we do with EFT is we simply organize several of the most potent points of acupuncture into a little ritual so you can remember to tap. The research shows that if you take somebody who’s stressed, the emotional brain — the central part of the brain, the limbic system — is highly active. When you have them tap while remembering a painful incident, it simply calms the brain down in a few seconds.”
