Acupuncturist Announces State Representative Candidacy
David Molony, PhD, LAc, announced on Nov. 17, 2009 his intentions to run for the Pennsylvania State Representative seat in the 133rd district.
Molony, an author and expert in Chinese medicine, is the first and only Caucasian to earn the coveted Renji Cup Award for his international work in acupuncture and Chinese medicine. He and his wife, Ming Ming, practice at the Lehigh Valley Oriental Medicine Center in Catasauqua, Penn. He has served on numerous 501(c)6 organizations, including a nine-year position as the executive director for the American Association of Acupuncture.
"State income is decreasing during this economic downturn, while spending is increasing, and simple small increases in efficiency are not enough," Molony stated, adding that the state needs to look at economic factors in an entirely different way, from a community service standpoint.
For more information about his campaign, Molony may be reached at dave@davidmolony.com or by visiting www.davidmolony.com.
OCOM Library wins grant, Hires new Research Dean
The Oregon College of Oriental Medicine (OCOM) was recently awarded a Library Services & Technology Act (LSTA) grant in the amount of $58,000. This will help the college to enhance its library. The library will be using the funds to migrate its current stand-alone bibliographic catalog to the shared Portland Health Libraries Consortium Catalog. This catalog consists of holdings from Oregon Health & Science University, the National College of Natural Medicine and Western States Chiropractic College.
This project will allow users within the library system to have seamless access to materials housed at the four participating institutions. Increased access to this robust catalog of consortium research holdings will further encourage interactive, cross-disciplinary scholarship.
In other OCOM news, Deborah Ackerman, PhD, was selected as an associate Dean of Research. Ackerman has a long history of grant-writing and is familiar with CAM outcomes assessment research. She focuses on evaluating treatment outcomes, with an emphasis on CAM treatment approaches.
While working as an adjunct professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), School of Public Health, Ackerman taught and mentored graduate students and research fellows. She is also the Director of Patient-Reported Outcomes from Complementary, Alternative, and Integrative Medicine (PROCAIM), a Web-based data collection and information system that uses standardized questionnaires to evaluate treatment utilization and assess changes over time in symptom severity, mood, stress, coping skills and quality of life.
AOM Groups Form Strategic Plan
On Sept. 21, 2009, a group of representatives from various AOM associations assembled in San Francisco to develop a strategic plan for advancing the AOM profession in the United States. Representatives of the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the American Organization for Bodywork Therapies of Asia, the Council of Colleges of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the Federation of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Regulatory Agencies, the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, the National Federation of Chinese Traditional Chinese Medicine Organizations and the Society for Acupuncture Research were all in attendance.
The group developed a five-year vision statement that declared: "By 2014, acupuncture and Oriental medicine (AOM), an independent, licensed profession, will be fully accessible to the public throughout American health care." The organizations then developed a strategic plan consisting of four three-year goals:
NCCAOM's CEO, Kory Ward-Cook, stated, "The collegiality, passion, and mutual commitment that characterized the San Francisco meeting hold promise for greater unity within the profession and, in turn, a more powerful and effective movement forward for AOM for the benefit of practitioners, patients, and health care in the United States."
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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