Acupuncture Poll's question for the month of April 2001 was:
"What percentage of your patients are above the age of 65?"
Results are as follows:
These results are based upon responses from 100 people. Here is a sample of the comments made by those who took the survey and how they voted:
50% or greater: More than 50% of my patients are >70 years old. Most of them are on 10-20 Rx drugs per day! I am not having great results with pain relief due to the fact that most are overweight, on many drugs (including coumadin), and have pacemakers. Also, most have never tried acupuncture before, and the mindset is not conducive to healing in a holistic manner. They are also set in the old ways of cooking food ...grilling, frying, etc., and will not change. On the positive side, a few of my older patients with chronic pain have had acupuncture for 15-20 yrs and are not on Rx. These patients always get relief after treatment. Long story short: the younger the patient, the better the results of the treatment. Hope this was not too long a response, I could say a lot more.
50% or greater: I see a lot of retired folks and see a special market here. There is much use of drugs on a regular basis, and complications. I see a growing area that is not really dealt with much in acupuncture schools and conferences: Oriental medicine and the aging population.
For more information on the Acupuncture Poll, contact Acupuncture Today at editorial@acupuncturetoday.com.
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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