Author’s Note: I recently sat down with Matthew Bauer, who has been in practice since 1986. He is the president of the Acupuncture Now Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating people about the benefits of acupuncture; and author of the book Making Acupuncture Pay: Real-World Advice for Successful Private Practice.
BR: The looming rise in diabetes cases, projected to reach 39.7 million adults in the U.S. by 2030,1 underscores the future challenge of peripheral neuropathy (PN). And that figure doesn’t include chemo-induced and idiopathic peripheral neuropathies.
MB: Exactly. The diabetes epidemic is also causing a PN epidemic, as 30% of all diabetics and 50% of diabetics over 65 develop PN. Add to that chemotherapy and HIV/AIDS PN and then the millions of unknown origin or idiopathic PN sufferers, and the numbers are startling. These are all referred to as stocking-and-glove PN, as the lower legs and hands are where the pain and numbness mainly take place.
And there is no cure? No. There are some drugs that give limited relief for PN pain, but none that can reverse the nerve damage associated with PN that not only causes pain, but many other symptoms, especially the numbness that is the main factor behind complications like foot sores in diabetics.
Tell me about your experiences treating PN. I had been treating PN since the 1980s with good success. Even though I am an intuitive acupuncturist who finds points by feel, I was finding the same points on different PN patients. I eventually developed a five-point formula for treating PN in the feet and three-point formula for treating PN in the hands, achieving 80-plus percent success rates. When I decided to put together an online course to teach my protocols, I did a review of the research on acupuncture for PN and was amazed by what I found. That’s when the idea of the Acupuncture Now Foundation (ANF) mounting a campaign to increase awareness that acupuncture is the best treatment for PN was born.
Please tell me about your campaign. The campaign is based first on the fact that acupuncture can spark regeneration of damaged nerves, something that can’t be matched by conventional treatment. There have been multiple studies going back more than a decade demonstrating that acupuncture improves nerve conduction, based on NCS and EMG tests. I have seen this happen consistently with patients who could not feel the needles and then started to feel them as the treatment plan progressed, but I didn’t know this had been verified by research. That’s huge.
What are some obstacles, and your next logical steps in the process? One problem is getting the public, other healthcare providers and health policymakers to actually pay attention to the research. Part of our plan to accomplish this is submitting a summary of research to the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and having them consider covering acupuncture for peripheral neuropathy under Medicare. The formal process is called a National Coverage Determination.
We spent several months compiling and categorizing the research and, by the time this interview is published, the ANF will have submitted that data to the CMS. They will evaluate the research we submit and then perform their own review. This whole process becomes part of the public record and will also include two 30-day windows [during which] others can submit information to the CMS. We will then use this evidence in outreach campaigns to educate everyone about why acupuncture should be seen as the standard treatment for this very widespread condition.
How can acupuncturists learn your evidence-based protocol? Take the four-hour online course “Five Point Nerve Regeneration Peripheral Neuropathy Protocol.” It’s offered through the Net of Knowledge and their distribution partners like Lhasa OMS in the U.S., and they have a great system for students to give feedback and ask teachers questions. The feedback so far has been very positive, with people telling us they were able to apply the protocols in practice on day one and get good results. There are extensive videos of actual patients of mine showing how their hyposensitive nerves start to wake-up with successive treatments. I also review the points used in successful research and show that all the points in my protocol are found in that research.
Is there anything more you would like people to know about this campaign? Yes – all those who take the course will be able to opt-in to a database we are developing with Net of Knowledge. As the public and providers treating PN become aware through our outreach that acupuncture can help repair damaged nerves, they’ll look for properly trained acupuncturists to perform this protocol. We will be able to point them to this database and refer them to acupuncturists who have training in the evidence-based protocols found in successful research.
To make this as successful as possible, we also need buy-in from the profession as a whole. We are reaching out to acupuncture organizations and leaders the world over looking for partners to help make this happen.
Do you have a budget for the outreach campaigns you plan to undertake? The ANF has a grant from Google to use up to $10k a month in Google pay-per-click ads. The plan is to also apply the majority of the money raised from the sale of this course, together with the Google Ad funds, to pay for the outreach campaigns. The more courses that are taken, the more funds there will be to do this outreach and drive people to the database to find acupuncturists trained in these evidence-based protocols. Of course, as a U.S.-approved charity, we also welcome donations to help fund this campaign.
To learn more about the course and the campaign, go to the ANF website at www.acunow.org and click on the pn-campaign tab.
I wish you the best in your endeavor and hope that Medicare covers acupuncture for peripheral neuropathy in the future.
Reference
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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