While Gregg St. Clair became a columnist for Acupuncture Today in 2006 , long-time readers will be familiar with his contributions to the publication as a review editor, a position he has held since March 2004. A 2001 summa cum laude graduate of Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in San Diego, Calif., Gregg currently operates a private acupuncture and Oriental medicine practice in Clifton Park, N.Y. He also is a member of the National Qigong Association. He can be reached at gregg@stclairfamilyacupuncture.com, or through his Web site at www.stclairfamilyacupuncture.com.
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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