As we welcome in the Year of the Rooster, we look at some of its major characteristics: confidence and communication, which suits the image we have of the Rooster...strutting in the farmyard, crowing to the others that it's time to wake up. So, how can you as professionals communicate to those living around you (home or practice) the healing benefits of acupuncture and TCM? I think it's important to select and create a set of words that will touch the heart strings of people who are sick, having pain, or who want to experience good health and wellness.
As this medicine continues to grow rapidly in the U.S. we must all participate in the nurturing of its expansion. The NCCAOM recently formed a task force to work on messaging for the profession, and have even retained a PR firm to help assist. During the recent WHO meeting in Tokyo, Japan, representatives heard about the Traditional Medicine Diagnostic Codes (these codes will be included in chapter 24 of ICD-11) and the interest among the delegates, from numerous countries around the world, was very high and the acceptance very encouraging.
Acupuncture has numerous other professions, nipping at its heels, desiring to include this form of care into their scopes of practice. A question we should ask ourselves is, why? Is it just to increase their market share, or is it because this medicine works and creates new levels of health for millions of people who have been suffering from pain, headaches, and other ailments? It's because acupuncture has created a healing experience for many.
Our message must be trustworthy and timely. Now is the time, this is the year and each practitioner must strive to guide and advise their patients so they can share facts, details, and particulars about acupuncture and TCM, as it relates to each patient's chief complaint, health issues, and lifestyle. This information should begin with a general message about the medicine and how it can help you in your daily life.
So take the first step, give the patient knowledge, enough so they can share with a friend or family member. Talk, talk, talk to everyone you see and meet. Tell your story. Tell patient success stories. Share positive results. Answer questions. Be a resource, advisor and health advocate.
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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