The title of John Weeks' feature in his Sept. 4 The Integrator Blog is chilling: "Self-Interested Whims of the Oligarchs: Google and Facebook Kill Access to Alternative and Integrative Medicine." Here are a few excerpts; a modified version runs with permission in the November AT:
"The blog post to which my attention was called was entitled ‘When Big Brother Went High Tech.' The news from energy medicine author Lynn McTaggert jerked [the] attention of the integrative community to a story I'd long anticipated: Google's censors turned their attention to the still wild political-economical-medical frontier of ‘alternative medicine.' Osteopath and internet businessman Joseph Mercola reported that 99% of the traffic to his sometimes pugnacious mercola.com ‘'natural health' website was killed. ‘Integrative medicine' was not spared. Visits to the much more tame Dr. Weil site from that field's godfather dropped 66%."
"Changed Google algorithms cut in half traffic on [McTaggert's] e-magazine site ... She reported Mercola's even more devastating losses while also sharing [his] belief that Google's additional manual manipulation of search targets cut down additional traffic where the algorithms hadn't already driven in the knives. Why? Via associative laws – such as Google's investment in pharmaceutical solutions – McTaggert puts [Big Pharma] at the calamitous keyboard. ... McTaggert calls it ‘a massive concerted effort by Big Tech and giant corporations to censor the information you are allowed to see.'"
"What of smaller, less vocal and less powerful users? One of these, who wished to maintain anonymity, contacted me to note that his site and that of a colleague had each dropped by 50%. Neither was ready to blame Google, perhaps fearing repercussions.... [However], he directed me to a frightening though excellent resource that lays out the pattern of intentional suppression of traffic."
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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