Alarmed about using research protocols
Dear Editor:
I am alarmed about using research protocols to establish the validity of traditional Chinese medicine and associated health modalities. This theme keeps coming up in every issue of your newsletter, as well as similar publications in massage therapy. Your publication cited a report of research showing that acupuncture was superior to massage therapy in treating chronic neck pain (editor's note: see the September 2001 issue of Acupuncture Today). Another study (Archives of Internal Medicine, 2001) reported on research showing that massage therapy was superior to acupuncture for lower back pain. The logical progression would be to cut up the human body and dole out the parts to whoever wins a particular research contest.
"Evidence-based treatment protocols" are only the tip of the iceberg in a broader trend to Americanize Eastern methods of health and the healing arts. Two associated areas of concern are: 1) the regulation of clinical practice through state licensing, which empowers one group or guild over others to have the exclusive rights to practice specific treatment techniques; and 2) questing membership on health insurance panels, which involves another level of regulation and bureaucracy to determine who has exclusive rights to patient referrals.
Do TCM practitioners really want to go in this direction?
George A. Rhoads, PhD
Westboro, Massachusetts
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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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