Brian Benjamin Carter is an acupuncturist, herbalist, author, speaker, and consumer health advocate. His passion is to explain Oriental medicine to the layperson. Since 1999, hundreds of thousands of readers all over the world have visited his Pulse of Oriental Medicine (www.pulsemed.org), and read his more than 200 articles. Brian has also written for Massage & Bodywork Magazine, and consulted with national media, including Glamour, Real Simple, Christian Singles, and ESPN magazines. He is currently working with his literary agent on a series of Chinese medicine books for the layperson.
Brian humbly hopes to help expand the vision and increase the skills of Chinese medicine professionals, and is devoted in the long-run to raising personal and academic standards, and to integrating Chinese and western medicine.
To further his development in body, mind, and spirit, Brian keeps his head in the Chinese classics and MEDLINE, his heart in the Hebrew and Greek of the Christian Bible, and his body in rock climbing and basketball. He hopes one day to be the oldest, shortest player ever to be drafted into the National Basketball Association.
Brian lives in sunny San Diego, California, with his wife, Lynda Harvey-Carter, and their two wonderful kittens.
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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