Editor's Note: This article was submitted by the NCCAOM.
As healthcare continually embraces new technologies, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making a notable impact in acupuncture. While AI’s integration promises enhanced treatments and patient outcomes, it necessitates a cautious approach focused on safety and efficacy.
Balancing AI’s Innovation With Safety
AI’s potential to revolutionize healthcare through data analysis and insights must be balanced with safety and ethical use, particularly in acupuncture. Ensuring patient safety involves several critical steps:
The Role of the NCCAOM AI Taskforce
In recognition of the potential of AI to transform acupuncture practice, the NCCAOM has established an AI Taskforce. This taskforce aims to explore the responsible integration of AI into acupuncture practice, with a focus on ensuring patient safety, maintaining ethical standards, and promoting the highest quality of care.
The NCCAOM AI Taskforce is seeking subject-matter experts with defined skills and education to serve in various capacities. These experts will play a crucial role in shaping the future of acupuncture by providing guidance, expertise, and insights into the responsible use of AI technologies. If you are interested, qualification requirements and online volunteer application instructions are available here.
Collaborative Efforts for Safety
Successful AI integration in acupuncture requires cooperation among practitioners, developers, regulators, and patient groups to ensure safety and develop best practices.
AI’s union with acupuncture offers exciting possibilities for healthcare, demanding a careful, ethical approach to realize its full potential safely. By working together, the acupuncture community can leverage AI to improve patient care while upholding the highest safety and ethical standards.
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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