AWB Provides Services to Heal Trauma After Super Storm Sandy
Brenda Duran
| DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE
As thousands of people continue to pick up the pieces following Superstorm Sandy in the east coast, Acupuncturists without Borders have begun to offer free relief to survivors.
For many of those who still remain homeless and hundreds of thousands who still lack power the stress can become unbearable, leading to severe trauma. The organization began treating people with ear acupuncture and community-style acupuncture treatments to treat everything from anxiety to depression this past week in the New York city region.
"The people are distraught. Our healing clinics will surely bring hope and comfort in the tough rebuilding times ahead," said Daryl Thuroff, a AWB Volunteer and NYC licensed acupuncturist.
In the past, AWB led similar relief efforts to more than 60,000 people to help them recover after Hurricane Katrina, the Iowa floods, the California wildfires, the Boulder wildfires, and with traumatized populations in Nepal, Ecuador, Mongolia, and Haiti.
Organizers said the treatments are effective because often people who are traumatized can't sleep, digest food properly, think, and sometimes even speak. Their nervous systems become stuck in a state of fight or flight.
"Although counseling and talk therapy are important, they cannot address the need alone since severe trauma is a physiological response which becomes locked in the body, and requires a physical intervention to unlock," said Diana Fried, AWB executive director. "The community-style acupuncture treatments provided by Acupuncturists Without Borders serve this function in a way that is low-tech, low-cost, and easy to teach, as well as highly effective."
AWB will be posting the location of clinics as more open in the New York City, Long Island and New Jersey areas. For more information, and to support the work in New York, Long Island and New Jersey go to http://acuwithoutborders.org/donations.php
A student stands over a patient, needle poised. They have a “perfect” prescription: a textbook combination of points harvested from a lecture slide on chronic lower back pain. But as the needle meets the skin, the student hesitates - the symptom of a quiet habit that has taken hold of our profession. We routinely say we “prescribe” points. It sounds efficient. It echoes the authority of biomedical culture and fits neatly into the insurance field. But vocabulary is never neutral; repeated long enough, it dictates behavior.
Acupuncture can be highly effective in cases of nasal congestion so common in allergy presentations; so much so that I often treat such issues using acupuncture protocols alone. In cases of seasonal allergies with highly predictable causes such as obvious elevations of environmental allergens, I use a skeleton acupuncture prescription that can easily be fleshed out to target potential underlying patterns and effectively customized to the patient.
The field of acupuncture in the U.S. continues to grow in visibility, patient demand and clinical effectiveness. Yet behind the curtain, many acupuncturists are quietly struggling to keep their doors open. While the profession is rooted in centuries of healing tradition, modern economic pressures – particularly those driven by insurance limitations, low reimbursement rates and job-market saturation – are making it increasingly difficult for licensed acupuncturists to thrive.
