Bob Flaws received training at Shanghai College of Chinese Medicine in acupuncture, tuina and herbal medicine. He currently is the main editor and translator for Blue Poppy Press. He is also a founder, past president and Lifetime Fellow of the Acupuncture Association of Colorado, a founding member of the National Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine Alliance, and a Fellow of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine in the UK. He has also served as the editor of the Colorado Acupuncturist and the Journal of the National Academy of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. He is also a coauthor of an NIH-funded acupuncture research protocol on AIDS-related peripheral neuropathy, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
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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