The American Society of Acupuncturists' first national meeting, "The State of our Union," will be held June 1-3, 2019 in Washington, D.C. This meeting is neither an academic conference, nor a purely internal discussion, but rather a conference to connect our profession with leaders throughout the medical and legislative fields.
It is a chance for us to listen as a professional group, and gain insights into where American medicine is headed, and how we as a professional group can fit into that picture. It's also a chance for us to introduce ourselves to thought leaders from major governmental, military, not-for-profit, and insurance entities, so that licensed acupuncturists can begin to step onto the national stage as a well-informed, solidly grounded force for positive change in U.S. health care.
Events Within the Meeting
Dr. Len Wisneski will be a key speaker at this inaugural annual happening. Dr. Wisneski is a clinical professor of medicine at George Washington University Medical Center, and adjunct faculty in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology, division of integrative physiology, at Georgetown University where he is a founding member of the complementary and alternative medicine curriculum planning committee.
He also holds faculty positions in the Departments of Medicine and Nursing at The University of Colorado. He served as Vice Chairman of the National Institute of Health, (NIH), Consensus Panel on Acupuncture and is Chairman of the NIH Advisory Board on Frontier Sciences at the University of Connecticut. He holds fellowship positions in The American College of Physicians, The American College of Nutrition, and The American Institute of Stress.
He served on the board of the American Holistic Medical Association and was President of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine. Currently, he is chairman of the board of the Integrative Healthcare Policy Consortium, (IHPC), which promotes national legislation pertaining to integrative healthcare. He is also a Research Advisor to The International Hyperbaric Medicine Association and serves on the advisory board of The Academic Consortium for Complementary and Alternative Healthcare. Dr. Wisneski has published over 30 scientific articles and a textbook, "The Scientific Basis of Integrative Medicine." He has been in the clinical practice of endocrinology and integrative medicine for over 30 years.
In his role as Chair of the Board of Directors of the IHPC, Dr. Wisneski led the first annual Integrative Pain Care Policy Congress in San Diego in 2017, and the second in Boston at Harvard University in 2018. Dr. Wisneski also led the first Integrative Health and Wellness caucus on Capitol Hill where he spoke about the crisis of physical, emotional and psychological pain in the U.S. and how patients benefit from integrative medicine, including acupuncture. He reminds us that the opioid crisis is ONE of the many pieces involved in this pain epidemic, and we will learn how acupuncture and acupuncturists can be part of the solution to our current healthcare crisis.
We hope every practitioner of this medicine, and all of those who love it and wish for it to thrive in the U.S., will join us to hear Dr. Wisneski and other phenomenal leaders. Together we can strengthen this profession to the benefit of the public, and have fun and satisfaction on that path.
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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