AATAOM Announces First Annual Meeting
The American Association for Teachers of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (AATAOM) will be holding a meeting to establish the direction and future goals of the organization. New-member enrollment and participation will also be a topic of discussion. The agenda will cover setting up future meeting/conference schedules, selecting important topics of discussion and electing the Board of Directors. The meeting will be held at the AAOM 2006 Expo at the Wigwam Destination Resort and Spa in Litchfield, Arizona in the Bougainvillea Room on Sunday, Oct. 22, 2006, from 10a.m. to noon.
The AATAOM is a national news, information and educational association supporting the development and advancement of the teachers of acupuncture and Oriental medicine. Membership in the AATAOM is open to anyone interested in supporting the acupuncture and Oriental medicine teaching profession and the future of Oriental medicine. For more information, please visit the association's Web site at www.aataom.org or call (512) 454-0006.
PCOM Celebrates Milestone Anniversary
Over the past 20 years, the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (PCOM) has been educating students and working in conjunction with lawmakers and medical professionals to advance the standards of the Oriental medicine profession and to strengthen the college's curriculum. PCOM has received numerous awards for its curriculum and clinical training, as well as research grants from the National Institutes of Health.
Since 1990, the San Diego-based school has been accredited by ACAOM, extending the accreditation to its New York campus in 1993. In 2000, a new campus located in Chicago, Ill. was opened to the public, which later that same year was approved by the Illinois Board of Higher Education to offer a Master of Traditional Oriental Medicine degree. PCOM's San Diego campus was approved to be the first school in California to be accredited for the prestigious Doctoral Program in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (DAOM) in 2003.
In 1988, PCOM held a trade show and educational conference called the Pacific Symposium. Eighteen years later, the Symposium continues to offer the finest speakers from around the world and extensive educational workshops. (For information on this year's Pacific Symposium, see "2006 PCOM Symoposium Preview.")
PCOM continues to make every effort to advance the field of Oriental medicine with its research, high educational standards, legislative participation, and community involvement.
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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