JoAnn Tall has been studying traditional Chinese medicine since 1972. She received her California acupuncture license in 1979 and her Doctor of Oriental Medicine degree in 1983. She was the director of the Santa Barbara branch campus of the California Acupuncture College from 1981 to 1986, and co-founded the Santa Barbara College of Oriental Medicine in 1986, where she has served as president since the schoolÕs inception. She also co-founded Healing Opportunities, a non-profit organization that promotes research, treatment and education in the field of integrative medicine. She maintains a private practice in Santa Barbara, and is involved in research concerning hepatitis C and HIV/AIDS.
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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