Dr. Ajay Goel is a professor and chair of Department of Translational Genomics and Oncology at the Beckman Research Institute City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, and director of Biotech Innovations at the City of Hope Medical Center, in Duarte, Calif. He has also been recognized as an American Gastrointestinal Association Fellow (AGAF) for his research on colorectal cancer. In fact, Dr. Goel has spent more than 20 years researching cancer and has been the lead author or contributor to over 300 scientific articles published in peer-reviewed international journals, as well as several book chapters. He is currently researching the prevention of GI cancers using integrative and alternative approaches, including botanical products. Three of the primary botanicals he is investigating are curcumin (from turmeric), boswellia and French grape seed. For inquiries regarding his research, contact him at ajgoel@coh.org.
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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