David Bruce Leonard is a practitioner and teacher of all five branches of traditional Chinese medicine: acupuncture, herbal medicine, massage, dietary therapy and martial arts exercises. He has studied with traditional medicines with healers in Asia, North and South America, Europe and Hawaii. With a master's degree in traditional Chinese medicine, he has a working knowledge of more than 400 traditional Hawaiian, Chinese and Western plants.
David is the Director of Herbal Studies at the Traditional Chinese Medical College of Hawaii. He is also co-director of Awapuhi Health Sanctuary, a residential treatment facility on the big island of Hawaii. A deep ecologist and Hawaiian native plant specialist, he has been a student of Hawaiian medicine under Kahu Kawika Ka'alakea, Na Kupuna 'O Maui, and Kaipo Kaneakua since 1992. He studies, lectures and teaches widely on herb-drug interactions; cross-cultural uses of plant medicines; environmental concerns; traditional plant gathering practices; and pragmatic approaches to health care. He is currently writing two books.
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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