On February 19, 2002, the first issue of Acupuncture Today's (AT's) To Your Health consumer e-mail newsletter was sent electronically to 37,531 subscribers. This newsletter fills a great need in that it provides quality information about acupuncture and related topics every month in a colorful electronic format.
The newsletter is produced in three different formats to accommodate various levels of Internet access and e-mail program sophistication:
Perhaps the best aspect of the consumer e-mail newsletter program is that it refers consumer subscribers to the participating acupuncturist in their area. This sophisticated program matches each consumer subscriber against a database of participating acupuncturists. When a participating acupuncturist is found in the same community, that doctor's contact information and photograph (as requested by the doctor) is featured at the top of that subscriber's e-mail newsletter. In this way, the consumer subscriber is reminded of the participating acupuncturist each time they receive an issue of To Your Health. (Additional information and a sample of the newsletter can be found at www.acupuncturetoday.com/memberinfo.)
The first issue of TYH contained the following features written specifically for consumers and patients:
In addition, the program gives participating acupuncturists the ability to send their own e-mail newsletters to patients. Unfortunately, the current number of participating acupuncturists cannot begin to fill the need to refer every subscriber to a doctor in their area.
The goal of this program is to make current and prospective patients more aware of the benefits of acupuncture and Asian healing, and to encourage them to seek care from a participating provider. While the program is beginning with over 37,000 subscribers, that number is expected to grow via website visitors and through an online marketing campaign that AT will be launching shortly. Acupuncturists interested in participating in this effort should contact Acupuncture Today's Reader Services department at 1-800-359-2289.
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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