On Oct. 1, 2007, the Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (ACAOM) released for public comment the first draft of proposed First-Professional Doctoral Accreditation Standards, which were developed by the ACAOM Doctoral Task Force.
Individuals and groups must submit those comments no later than Dec. 15, 2007, by visiting the following link: www.acaom.info. Individuals will be able to review the standards and submit commentary, or indicate that they are in support of the standards as written.
After the Doctoral Task Force reviews the feedback from the first draft, it will make appropriate revisions, as necessary. A second draft will be available for comments and input at a later date. The ACAOM's goal is to conclude this work by the summer of 2008.
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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