"Looking for certification after only a 300-hour course is not fair to those who studied 3000 hours and sat for the exam. If acupuncturists said they wanted to take 300 hours of chiropractic courses to be certified, I don't think the chiropractors would like it. Chiropractors know anatomy very well, and (they know) how to palpate, but it's another thing to learn how to needle, to do tongue and pulse diagnosis."
- Robert Borzone, DC, LAc, Long Island, New York
"To think that a chiropractor could do 300 hours and treat back pain in the spirit of acupuncture is not acceptable. It's not a question of having a pain in your back so you put a needle where it hurts. That would only diminish acupuncture and send the wrong message to consumers about what acupuncture is."
- Kathleen Golden, president, Acupuncture Society of New York
Reference
Chronic pain afflicts over 20% of the adult population. Sadly, most MDs have essentially no education in treating pain, beyond offering a few toxic medications. Then they tend to steer people with pain away from those health practitioners who are trained. This puts the acupuncture community on the front lines for addressing this epidemic.
When the body is going through a stressful event, the sympathetic system is activated. This activation will help the body with a life-threatening situation. If this state is activated for prolonged periods of time, it starts to consume energy. These traumatic events that generate stressors in the autonomic nervous system (ANS) will eventually become internalized.
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One of the things that makes acupuncture so difficult to measure is that the medicine actually does contain some esoteric aspects. There have been numerous studies that demonstrate the neurochemical reasoning behind why acupuncture points stimulate the autonomic nervous system to enact change However, not all the benefits of TCM can easily be measured by randomized, controlled trials. But does that make them fundamentally and definitively untrue?
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