TCM World Foundation Extends Student Sponsorship Application Deadline for Conference
The Traditional Chinese Medicine World Foundation has announced that it is extending the application deadline for sponsorships for up to 10 additional full-time acupuncture students to attend its sixth annual "Building Bridges of Integration for TCM" conference, held Oct. 19-21, 2007.
Interested full-time acupuncture students can download a sponsorship application at www.tcmconference.org/students.html. Entries must be received no later than Sept. 15, 2007. Sponsorships cover registration for the conference from Oct. 19-21. Travel and lodging stipends may also be awarded, based on the discretion of the TCM World Foundation.
For more general information about the conference, please visit: www.tcmconference.org.
Acupuncture Helping the Homeless
An innovative acupuncture program run by University of California, Berkeley undergraduates to serve the local homeless youth population is one of 13 recipients of $207,500 in grants from the university's Chancellor's Community Partnership Fund.
The Youth Acupuncture Wellness Program, which received a $15,000 grant, serves the homeless youth who live on the streets surrounding the university. In addition to providing acupuncture services, the clinic provides education services on mental illness and addiction, serves meals and can even give medical referrals when necessary. All services are free of charge. Acupuncture services are provided by Hope McDonald, a local acupuncturist who previously ran a clinic for the homeless in San Francisco.
The Youth Clinic is part of a larger student organization called The Suitcase Clinic, which provides medical, legal and other social services for homeless and low-income people in the Berkeley area.
Alan Steinbach, MD, clinical professor of public health and faculty advisor for the clinic, noted, "These are basically healthy people, not set in their ways, not mentally incompetent. They are a group in transition and are very open to influence."
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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