For over 30 years, the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (AAAOM) has served as our national AOM professional association, representing licensed acupuncturists and AOM health care providers throughout the U.S. as well as some members in foreign countries. Over the past five years, AAAOM has been monitoring and engaging the ever-changing terrain of healthcare delivery in the U.S. as well as working to fine tune our goals and services to assist our members in this challenging economy that affects us all.
Currently, AAAOM's primary goals are to assist its state organization leaders and members to become stronger and more efficient and to work with them to promote AOM at the state and national levels.If these goals are to be realized, we, as a group, must continually define our goals for the profession while keeping a strong presence in Washington. We are all volunteers, and we ask LAcs like you to step up and help the profession that we all love and respect.
If you care about acupuncture and AOM as ongoing healthcare options, and if you have the passion, time, and talent to get things done by working with like-minded people, please consider running for the AAAOM Board of Directors. The AAAOM leadership has identified a number of desired attributes that applicants should possess:
Nominations are now open and will close on January 23, 2012.
For complete details, go to www.aaaomonline.org. Please encourage your colleagues you feel would make a significant contribution to the well-being of our profession to run for the AAAOM Board of Directors. This is a gratifying job, and the board is composed of wonderful, motivated, and dedicated people.
REMINDER: Elections are now online only. They open February 1 and close March 1, 2012. (There are no mail-in ballots.) Please go to www.aaaomonling.org for all of the details.
This column will help keep you updated and informed about the newest developments at the American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. The AAAOM "was formed in 1981 to be the unifying force for American acupuncturists committed to high ethical and educational standards, and a well-regulated profession to ensure the safety of the public." For more information about the AAAOM, please visit www.aaaomonline.org.
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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