Integrative medicine seems to be a big buzzword lately. It is truly wonderful that there seems to be genuine interest on every level for combining complementary or alternative therapies with standard Western medicine. Hospitals, Western medical teaching institutions, cancer centers, and many other health care facilities realize the need for even a basic understanding and merging of these therapies with traditional health care.
There is a wonderful group of educators tackling this problem. The National Education Dialogue to Advance Integrated Health Care is comprised of educators from the most prestigious educational institutions and of the highest standards of excellence in their own fields. They are searching for the soul of health care education and have established a set of goals, including:
I was honored recently with an invitation to join the group's values project. I have been amazed, even in the short time I have been involved, at the depth and degree of professional investigation the group has conducted into this valuable area. You can keep up with this process and the subject of integrative medicine by going to the Web site www.integratorblog.com.
This coming decade will bring many changes for health care. I am holding tight to my personal vision of a health care system that is available to all and that offers many diverse and complementary avenues of healing, encompassing body, mind and spirit.
Please include me in your discussions about our health care for the future. I welcome all comments and discussion.
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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