Catherine Niemiec is the President/CEO and Founder of the Phoenix Institute of Herbal Medicine & Acupuncture. After her studies (University of Arizona, University of California-Hastings), she practiced law in California and served as director for a national legal education company. She became a certified practitioner of Chinese herbology, through the residency program at the Institute of Chinese Herbology in Oakland. She co-authored Arizona's acupuncture law that was enacted in 1998. She has served as president for numerous acupuncture boards and associations, and established the Foundation for PIHMA Research & Education.
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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