A hospital announces Tai Chi and Qigong classes and other complementary and alternative medicine news. A hospital announces Tai Chi and Qigong classes: Raritan Bay Medical Center’s Department of Integrative Medicine will offer a weekly, five-part workshop series, “Wellness through Tai Chi and Qigong,” 7-9 p.m., on five consecutive Mondays, July 28-Aug. 25, at the hospital’s Perth Amboy campus, 530 New Brunswick Ave. Individuals may register for any or all classes. Cost is $20 per person for o

Between 2002 and 2005, the number of prescriptions filled for antidepressant drugs increased from 154 million to 170 million.

Analysis showed that:

• 29 percent of prescriptions were written by psychiatrists
• 23 percent came from general practitioners
• 21 percent came from family practitioners
• 10 percent came from internal medicine specialists

The analysis was performed by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, and recently released by the U.S. government.

NS Hemam The other day there was an advertisement of a new herbal drug based on the formulation of Saikot medicine and some other herbs by a local Ayurvedic doctor; nobody seemed to have noticed or cared to raise a single question. That’s the tragedy, that’s where the irony lies - we still have not digested the whole issue in its totality and have not set our priorities right. What if a well known pharmaceutical company or RD institute comes up with another drug formulation based on the Saik

Two research studies evaluating dietary changes and complementary medicine for the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) have been launched at Rush University Medical Center. Funded by the National Institute of Health, one study will look at the impact of mind/body medicine on patients suffering from ulcerative colitis (UC) and the other will assess how diet impacts patients with Crohn’s Disease. There are two main types of IBD, Crohn’s disease and UC, which afflict approximately one