Acupuncture and Oriental medicine practitioners and students, as well as providers representing various other health care disciplines, flocked to San Diego's Catamaran Resort Hotel to attend the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (PCOM) Annual Symposium on Oct. 24-27.
The symposium, now in its 25th year featured a wide array of distinguished speakers such as: Jeffrey Yuen, Ted Kaptchuck, Kiiko Matsumoto, Miki Shima, Giovanni Maciocia, Lillian Bridges, and Matt Callison who presented seminars and interactive workshops covering a myriad of Oriental medicine topics from pregnancy acupuncture, facial reading and diagnosis, qi gong to traditional Thai massage.
The symposium also featured a multi-level exhibit hall that provided attendees access to the latest AOM supplies, practice-management tools and techniques from more than 70 vendors.
The conference also featured fun-filled festivities to celebrate the anniversary milestone of 25 years that the Pacific Symposium has been around. Organizers also challenged each of the speakers to present the theory, technique, or approach to a given condition that they know creates "Extraordinary Results."
The keynote speaker of the conference was Ted Kaptchuk, author and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Professor Kaptchuk discussed the latest clinical research on acupuncture, including controversial methods like "placebo acupuncture." He compared clinical and neurobiological findings on genuine and sham acupuncture, examining the East Asian perspective on placebo effects and medical ritual; and pondering how Nei Jing's idea of a "penetrating divine illumination" relates to placebo studies.
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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