The article by the NCCAOM board on "the issue of student loan debt" is utterly laughable. Debt isn't mentioned a single time in the entire article, and instead places the problem squarely at the feet of those practicing. Many practitioners graduate with over 100k in student loans — a problem entirely to do with the educators in our field — while less than 10 percent of everyone practicing in the U.S. makes that much in income.
Those who do often live in bigger cities that have much more expensive living costs, like higher housing prices. Does the NCCAOM realize that you need to make as much per year as the total amount of your loans to reasonably pay them back in 15 years? That is the ratio according to the Department of Education.
Simply telling people to promote themselves on the NCCAOM practitioner database is a "[screw] you, deal with it yourself" response to a real problem we all face. How dare you publish such a ridiculous article.
Evan Bussanich, LAc, Dipl. OM,
Ashville, North Carolina
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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