Dr. Arya Nielsen is an assistant clinical professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in the Department of Family Medicine & Community Health. She developed and directed the Acupuncture Fellowship for Inpatient Care at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. Her research includes treatment of chronic pain in underserved populations, acupuncture therapies for acute care and the inpatient setting, and both the physiology and therapeutic effect of the traditional East Asian healing technique gua sha.
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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