AOM Alliance Hires New Executive Director
The Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Alliance has announced the hiring of a new executive director. Dr. Michael R. McCoy was named to the position effective June 1. He becomes the third executive director in the Alliance's history, following Barbara Mitchell and Tierney Tully. Ms. Tully will continue as executive director of the National Acupuncture Foundation, a sister organization of the Alliance.
Dr. McCoy holds a PhD from Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., and master's and bachelor's degrees from Princeton and Emory & Henry College. He has served in a variety of senior management positions for three other non-profit organizations. Before taking over at the Alliance, he served as executive director of the Greater Cincinnati Library Consortium, a cooperative of more than 40 area libraries organized to promote library services among and through member institutions. Dr. McCoy's wife, Amy, will also join the Alliance staff.
NCCAOM 2005 Exam Schedule Announced
The National Certification Commission has announced the application and registration deadlines and exam dates for its 2005 examination schedule. NCCAOM examinations are offered three times a year at 27 sites in North America. Each administration consists of two days of testing, conducted on Saturdays and Sundays. The foundations of Oriental medicine and Chinese herbology modules will be held on Saturdays, while the acupuncture, point location and biomedicine modules will be offered on Sundays. The Asian bodywork therapy examination will also be held on Sundays; however, it will be administered in October only.
The NCCAOM exam schedule is as follows:
| Exam Date | February 19-20, 2005 | June 18-19, 2005 | October 15-16, 2005 |
| Application Deadline (the date by which all materials, including supporting documents and fees, must be postmarked) | November 19, 2004 | March 18, 2005 | July 15, 2005 |
| Registration Deadline (To register for the exam date and location of one's choice, NCCAOM must receive an exam registration form [ERF] by the registration deadline. Applicants will receive an ERF from NCCAOM after they are approved to test.) | December 31, 2004 | April 29, 2005 | August 26, 2005 |
For more information, or to see if there are any changes or additions to the exam schedule, please contact NCCAOM at (703) 548-9004 or visit www.nccaom.org.
Acupuncture Sessions Keep Popular Golfer in the Swing of Things
Fred Couples is one of the most popular golfers currently on the PGA Tour. A winner of 15 titles, including the 1992 Masters, Couples has had a rollercoaster-type career since joining the tour in 1981. This April, after a disappointing start to the season that saw him finish in the top 10 only once in his first 10 tournaments, Couples flew 13½ hours to Seoul, Korea to compete in the 2004 SK Telecom Open. Two days before the start of the Open, Couples rose out of a chair and suffered a severe pain in his back, the latest in a series of chronic back ailments that has plagued him for much of his career.
Fearing he wouldn't be able to play, Couples turned to a local acupuncturist for help. After a marathon four-hour session the night before the tournament and another session after playing the first round, Couples' back was in sufficient shape that he not only competed, but was able to play the entire tournament, where he finished tied for fifth.
"Honestly, I didn't think I was going to be able to play today," said Couples after the first acupuncture session. "The work done on my back made me feel great. I had needles stuck all over me, around my mouth, on the feet and in the back. I've had an acupuncture session once before back home, but it was nothing like this."
Upon his arrival back in the United States, Couples provided Golf World magazine with more details about the treatment he received and the effect it had on his back. Needles were inserted "in my fingers, in my butt, on my legs, (on) top of my head, (and) around my mouth," Couples recalled. "I was laying down for four hours, and it would up getting me through the week."
The acupuncture sessions appear to have strengthened not only Couples' back, but his golf game as well. In his next event, Couples finished second to Ernie Els at the Memorial Tournament for his best result of the year to date. The following week, after receiving another series of acupuncture treatments from Dr. Halina Snowball, a medical acupuncturist in Greenwich, Conn., he tied for fourth place at the Buick Classic. As we go to press, those showings have propelled Couples to 23rd on the PGA money list, with more than $1.2 million in earnings this year.
References
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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