Prepare yourself for more patients—according to a recent study, the MINDBODY Wellness Index, Americans are curious about acupuncture.
The survey, taken by nearly 17,000 participants, indicates that acupuncture ranks as the top integrative health service people want to try. In fact, 29 percent of respondents selected acupuncture over massage, acupressure, nutrition counseling, and others.1 Survey results also show acupuncture is the most popular for all age groups and genders with the exception of 18–25 year-old women, where it came in second behind massage services.
An interesting discovery—men prioritize integrative health slightly more than women (32 percent versus 29 percent). Men also spend more money on integrative health services than women ($300 versus $228 annually). However, fewer men have actually tried inte-grative health services.
It's important to note that last year Americans spent $14.7 billion out-of-pocket on services from complementary practitioners. About one-third of this was spent on conventional services. Around 30 percent of Americans prioritize integrative health through services like massage, acupuncture, chiropractic care, alternative health care, and others.
Overall, consumers ages 26–45 spend more per year ($312 average) than 18–25 year-olds ($204) and 46–65 year-olds ($228). In addition, 37 percent of Americans go to an integrative health practitioner three or more times a year. Unfortunately, the older age group engages less often in integrative health activities than the younger generation.
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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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