Greta Jeffrey is a licensed acupuncturist in Minneapolis, Minn. She received her Master of Acupuncture from Northwestern Health Sciences University in 2013 and her Doctor of Acupuncture from Pacific College of Health and Science (San Diego) in 2018. Greta is an assistant professor and the clinic co-chair in the College of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine at Northwestern Health Sciences University. She also advises the American Society of Acupuncturists (ASA) Student Committee in its advocacy efforts; and serves as president of the NHSU College of Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine's faculty senate.
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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