SANTA ANA , Calif. - Philip Stump, president of the American Acupuncture Council (AAC), has announced that all AAC members living in the areas affected by Hurricane Katrina will be receiving refund checks equal to 3 months of malpractice insurance premiums to tide them over during this difficult time. In addition, AAC members will also have the opportunity to retroactively cancel their coverage for this year if they so choose.
All AAC members will also be eligible to receive additional free leave periods if they are still not in better standing at the end of the 3-month period.
"We wanted our members who have been victimized by the Katrina disaster to know that we are behind them, and want to get money to them at a time when many of our members desperately need it," Stump explained. "We will continue to work with our members until they are able to reopen their acupuncture offices."
AAC members who would like to check on the status of their Katrina aid checks can call (800) 838-0383.
"We do not know the total amount of the Katrina aid checks, but we expect them to be substantial," Stump added.
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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