The place to find insurance billing codes is in the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codebook published by the American Medical Association. That's right: every copy of this book purchased by you and me benefits the AMA. They have created and have the copyright on these codes. This book is a listing of descriptive terms and identifying codes for reporting medical services and procedures performed by doctors. The purpose of the terminology is to provide a uniform language that will accurately describe treatment and diagnostic services, thus providing a uniform method of communicating between doctors, insurance companies and patients.
The codes go through revisions and changes through the CPT editorial panel, with the assistance of physicians representing all specialties of health care. Many third-party payers and government agencies also contribute. In my experience, your office copy of the CPT codes will need to be updated every three to five years.
The CPT Codebook does include two codes used for acupuncture and electroacupuncture. They are:
97780 - Acupuncture, one or more needles; without electrical stimulation;
97781 - Acupuncture, one or more needles, with electrical stimulation.
If you are in California and are treating an injured worker in the workers' compensation jurisdiction, there are other codes to be used. They are:
97800 -- Acupuncture, one or more needles; without electrical stimulation;
97801 -- Acupuncture, one or more needles, with electrical stimulation;
97802 - Cupping;
97803 - Moxa.
Note: If you are doing acupuncture/electroacupuncture with moxa and/or cupping, you will only be paid for the acupuncture or elcxtroacupuncture, whereas if you did only the moxa or cupping, you would be paid for those procedures. This was a cost-containment effort from when the codes were designed for the California workers' compensation official medical fee schedule.
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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