Texas College of TCM Announces Scholarship Program
The Texas College of Traditional College Medicine, in conjunction with the Lisa Lin Foundation, will award scholarships to 18 new students for the summer and fall semesters. While the summer semester deadline has already passed, prospective students still have until August 31 to apply for a scholarship for the fall semester. Each eligible student will receive up to $6000 for three years of study at the college. To apply, students must:
Upon approval of the scholarship, students will be notified of their acceptance and scheduled for registration. For more information, contact Texas College by phone at (800) 252-5088, or online at www.texastcm.edu.
Canadian Universities to Study Herbal Medicine for ADHD
The University of Alberta has awarded a Canadian researcher a $250,000 grant to study the effectiveness of herbal remedies in treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The University of British Columbia will also assist in the double-blind study, which is scheduled for completion this summer.
Dr. Michael Lyon, the director of research and education at the Oceanside Functional Medicine Research Institute in British Columbia, will direct the study. A total of 76 volunteers between the ages of six and 12 will participate. Half of the children will take an herbal product for six weeks, while the other half will receive a placebo. After six weeks, the children will take part in a two-week consultation program with researchers to determine what, if any, effect the remedy may have had.
"We want to apply the scrutiny of scientific research to see if it stands up," Lyon said.
Lyon conducted an informal study on herbal medicine and ADHD three years ago, which was accepted for publication by the Canadian Medical Association Journal. He expects the results of the current study to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine later this year.
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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