Hockey Star Finds Relief Through Acupuncture
Last season was a frustrating one for Dmitri Khristich, a left winger with the Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League. Although the Leafs finished with the best record in the Northeast Division and nearly made it to the Stanley Cup finals, Khristich spent much of the season on the sidelines, hobbled with a lingering groin injury.
In August, in an effort to alleviate the pain and speed up healing, Khristich began undergoing a series of acupuncture treatments. So far, the results have been better than expected.
"During the summer, I was concerned about the injury," he said. "I thought about it all the time. Then, suddenly, it didn't bother me any more and I forgot about it for a couple of days."
"It's getting better," he added. "This was the first time I skated in a while, and it didn't feel too bad."
Khristich is not the first Maple Leaf to turn to acupuncture for pain relief. "We started using acupuncture with Wendel Clark years ago," said Chris Broadhurst, the Leafs' athletic therapist. "It has really helped Dmitri. He has worked very hard this summer."
Spotlight on Dr. Pizzorno - Bastyr's Founder Named One of the "Four Most Influential People in Alternative Healthcare"
Dr. Joseph Pizzorno, ND, who recently stepped down as the president of Bastyr University, has been named one of the four "most influential" people in the field of alternative health care by Alternative Healthcare Management (AHM) magazine.
Dr. Pizzorno was hailed by the magazine as "the single most important non-MD CAM provider in the growth and maturation of the CAM movement." Under his guidance, Bastyr grew from a small school of less than three dozen students into one of the nation's leading complementary and alternative medicine research centers. He also chaired the American Public Health Association's special interest group on complementary and alternative medicine, and was the first naturopathic physician to serve on the Seattle/King County Board of Health.
Others named "most influential" by AHM included Dr. Tiffany field, the founder of the Touch Research Institute in Miami, Florida; Dr. Andrew Weil, a well-known educator, author, and proponent of integrative medicine; and Dr. Dean Ornish, a clinical professor of medicine and noted authority on the effects of diet and lifestyle on health.
Dr. Li Joins Florida Institute
Dr. Shaozhi Li has been appointed to the faculty of the Florida Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Prior to joining the institute, he was the associate chair of the Department of Basic Courses at Hunan College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. He also served as an associate professor at Murmansk Health Clinic in Russia.
Dr. Li received his PhD from Hunan College in 1999. He received MS and MD degrees from the same institution in 1987 and 1992, respectively.
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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