"A" Isn't Just for Acupuncture
Acupuncture patients are very happy with their providers — a survey reported that 99 percent of 89,000 participants (served in 2014 and 2015) said the quality of care they received by their acupuncture providers was good, very good or excellent.
According to the Clinician & Group Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey (CAHPS), these results were better than the benchmark results achieved by medical physician services.
Also, 96.5 percent of the surveyed patients agreed or strongly agreed they would recommend their acupuncture practitioner to family and friends, an uptick from the previous year's survey, which reported 90.5 percent would recommend their provider.
More important though, 93 percent of respondents to the survey said their provider was successful in treating their primary condition. As such, the utilization of acupuncture is sure to increase and contribute a presence within the managed health care system.
This survey was completed by American Specialty Health (ASH), a musculoskeletal health organization. For more information about ASH, please visit ashcompanies.com.
In Memoriam: Dr. Ray Rubio
Dr. Raymond E. Rubio died on March 4, 2017 following a struggle with pancreatic cancer, he was 55. A pioneer in the field of integrative medical fertility treatment he helped countless patients at his private practices, and contributed over 20 years of service to the acupuncture profession.
Before his death, he served as the Executive Director of the American Board of Oriental Reproductive Medicine (ABORM), the certification organization he founded in 2007. He also continued to fulfill his role as Chair of the Reproductive Medicine Department, and related doctoral program, at Los Angeles-based Yo San University.
Although Ray graduated from UCLA with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, with some thought to becoming an attorney, he had a change of heart about his career.
Having a longtime interest in marital arts he became interested in Chinese medicine. This led to him to enroll at Samra University in Los Angeles. He graduated in 1996 with a master's degree in Traditional Oriental Medicine.
Dr. Rubio began his practice at Golden Cabinet in West Los Angeles, where he was an intern. In 1997 Dr. Rubio and Christopher Reed opened a joint practice, Traditional Healing Arts Center, in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles.
He continued to practice there until moving to Westlake Village in 2006, where he established Westlake Complementary Medicine.
From 2000-2006, Ray helped to create and administer the acupuncture program at the Toluca Lake Health Center (now the Eberstein Center), an integrative clinic. He worked at both locations, and taught and supervised clinic interns at Emperor's College in Santa Monica, California.
In 2004, Dr. Rubio entered the newly formed doctoral program at Emperor's, receiving his Doctor of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (DAOM) degree in 2006.
Dr. Hammer recounts, "Ray and I were friends because we shared the same passion of the medicine. He was a man of great integrity, honesty and humanity, and his passing is a great loss
to Chinese medicine and people everywhere."
Dr. Rubio, divorced, is survived by his daughter Savannah Grace Rubio, 13, and Jesse Michael Rubio, 11.
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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