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Mountain West Wellness Health Tips, Issue #024
November 24, 2013
Hi

Welcome and thanks in advance for reading our winter newsletter. In it we have a little news about our most recent fundraiser, some holiday gift ideas, a call to action for Toys For Tots, an idea for a winter tea, and some research about acupuncture. We hope you enjoy it.

Holiday Gift Ideas

Are you looking for a couple of Holiday gifts this winter? We have a couple of recommendations. First if you are looking for a little gift for a female in your life we have a great book recommendation. It is called The WomanCode: Perfect Your Cycle, Amplify Your Fertility, Supercharge Your Sex Drive, and Become a Power Source by Alisa Vitti. Jack has been recommending this book to many female patients as a way to help understand how diet and hormones can work toward or against you. Check it out at this Amazon link.

For men who want to enhance performance the book, Testosterone a Man’s Guide by Nelson Viergel is pretty good. You can Check it out at this Amazon page. In addition, we are now selling gift cards that you can share with your family and friends. There is nothing like giving the gift of health.

Holiday Toy Drive Announcement

It’s holiday time and at Mountain West Wellness we like to celebrate this time of giving by sponsoring our annual toy drive. This will be our 5th year of participating in the Share-A-Gift Toy Drive which provides toys for low income children. Operating since 1972, this collection project serves over 600 families and approximately 2,000 children each year.
We will have a drop box here at the office beginning mid-November for new and gently used toys. The complete “wish list” of needed toys will be available at the clinic, but the requests include bicycles, books, games & puzzles, toddler toys, dolls & Barbie’s, action figures, and backpacks filled with school supplies.
To help out with this drive we have created a win-win situation to help everyone this season! We are asking for your support in the toy drive and we will pass the giving on to you and your family. Because you are very important to us and we greatly appreciate you recommending us to the people in your life we want to give you the opportunity to receive a gift as well.

Here is how it works:
You donate a toy to the drive and we will enter you in a drawing for a gift from our pool of wonderful gifts. There is everything from FREE office visits, massages, gift cards to local business, and more.

In exchange for your toy donation we will give you two gift cards to be used by anyone who is new to our clinic. The gift cards are valued at $100 and can be used to cover a first acupuncture treatment. The gift card will include a letter explaining it. Next time you come in please bring a toy and the names and addresses of who you would like the gift cards to go to. You can also just drop them by during our regular business hours.

There is no limit to the number of gift cards that you can have sent and we will address the envelopes, provide the postage and mail them for you.
You have the opportunity to help people that you care about for FREE and you are able to give a child in need a much appreciated gift. Please help us fulfill our purpose of helping as many people as we can get healthy, help your friends and family get healthy and help us support Toys for Tots.

Boulder County Flood Fundraiser - Success

Each October we celebrate National Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Day and this year we added a twist. Because of the devastating floods in Boulder County we felt compelled to sponsor a fundraiser that would give back to our community. We chose The Emergency Family Assistance Association (EFAA) with one hundred percent of the collected proceeds going directly to those affected by the flood for food, rent, and utility assistance.
Local businesses like Carrabbas donated delicious food for everyone to enjoy. We also received numerous prize donations from the Boulder Dinner Theatre, The Mediterranean, King Soopers, Life Works Coaching, and The Cheesecake Factory. Held at the beautiful Academy of Chinese Martial and Cultural Arts, Jack and Seth provided acupuncture treatments for a donation of $15.00 to EFAA. In exchange, donators were entered into a prize drawing. Many people from the community attended, current patients and others new to Chinese medicine. Part of celebrating National Acupuncture Day is educating the public on the benefits of acupuncture and Chinese medicine so we were happy to introduce many newcomers to this powerful medicine. To everyone that attended we say thank you for your support.
Participants were also treated to free shiatsu massage from Lynn Swearingen, which needless to say were in high demand.
A few lucky winners received 5 free acupuncture treatments generously donated by Jack and Seth and 2 months of free Kung Fu lessons donated by Howie Solo who kindly opened his doors to host our event.
Lynn Swearingen donated 2 massages and Maggie McReynolds at Life Works Coaching donated a personal coaching session.
Our mission is to help as many people as we can. Aside from treating patients and helping people to realize their maximum health we regularly do free community workshops, lectures, classes, and charity fundraisers.

Winter Tea

Now that the weather is getting colder we need to start to shift our diet. An important part of Chinese medicine theory is knowing how to fit into the seasonal shifts. Colder weather means that we need to shift away from eating too much raw or cold food. Our body needs its yang energy in order to keep our body warm and therefore doesn’t have that much to spare for digestions. Thus if we eat warm and cooked food our body doesn’t have to work so hard.
Many of our patients are avid tea drinkers and are using tea as a way to get away from coffee. The trouble is, lots of people crave coffee as the weather gets cold. While tea is a good substitute, not all teas are the same. Many of us love green tea, but it is energetically cold. So, even though the tea is a hot beverage, the energy of it is cold. Try putting cooked leaves on an inflamed bug bite some time! The tea we should be drinking as the weather gets cold is called Pu Er. Pu Er is an aged tea that gets more valuable the older it gets. It is energetically warm and promotes digestion, helps menstrual disorders, and even has some anti-cancer properties. It has a strong and rich flavor, more like coffee than tea. There are lots of variations of Pu Er, I suggest you go to a local tea shop and taste them to find one you like. There is a great shop on Pearl St. called Ku Cha. They are knowledgeable and very helpful. Good luck and try it. You can read the. the tea page on our website.

Chinese Herbs in the News

In our last newsletter I wrote an article about the trouble with icing injuries. Many patients have responded with positive results when switching over from ice to heat on their own. I have been getting more questions as to what someone can do on their own to speed up healing. In Chinese medicine we often use topical herbal therapies. These can be plasters, soaks, washes and liniments. They can be very helpful, for example the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University did a study and bound that topical herbal plasters increased the ultimate tensile strength of injured ligaments and decreased stiffness post injury. Next time you get injured, aside from your acupuncture treatment, we can send you come with topical herbs to speed up healing!

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Stay Healthy!

Jack, Kim, and Lynn



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