Michael O. Smith, MD, DAc, founder and chairperson of the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA) and internationally recognized for developing an acupuncture treatment protocol for chemical dependency, passed away on Dec. 24, 2017. He is survived by his daughters, Joanna Smith and Jessica Hutter.
Dr. Smith was a psychiatrist, acupuncturist, addiction specialist and public health planner who served as associate professor of psychiatry at Cornell Medical School and directed the Lincoln Hospital Recovery Center in The Bronx, N.Y., for more than three decades.
A graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, Dr. Smith accomplished a great deal for the acupuncture profession while advancing the treatment of chemical dependency.
Here are a few of his other successes, documented in a self-authored curriculum vitae provided by NADA upon his passing:
"Teaching correction officers to do acupuncture in Dartmoor Prison [England]. Now it is used in over a hundred English prisons."
"Being mentioned in an article on the front page of the Chinese-language daily in Beijing after speaking to a medical school about using acupuncture for AIDS."
"Coordinating the PTSD stress-relief treatment of hundreds of Katrina first responders and then helping to establish funded acupuncture training for dozens of New Orleans' locals."
The most important relationship I seek to nurture in the treatment room is the one a patient has with their own body. We live in a culture that teaches us to override pain, defer to outside authority, and push through discomfort. Patients often arrive hoping I can “fix” them, but the truth is, we can’t do the work for them. We can offer guidance, insight and support, but healing requires their full participation.
In the U.S alone, approximately one in nine adults (11.1%) report experiencing subjective cognitive decline. A comparable percentage will go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. As researchers and clinicians seek integrative solutions outside of conventional pharmacological approaches, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) emerges as a promising, multimodal strategy in the prevention and treatment of cognitive decline.
When we are in the grips of an anxious pattern, it dominates our brain and nervous system, and we lose our normal body-mind regulation. In this and subsequent articles, I present effective mindfulness-based method* via case study, that we can add to our acupuncture treatments to help clients consciously stop the dysregulating cascade of events and bring “distressed parts” into coherent body-mind-spirit integration.
