Joe Pandolfo went from the building trades and night school to a 29-year career in corporate health care. He has served with the Connecticut Society of Acupuncturists (CTSA) for 14 years, and drafted the state's current LAc scope of practice and NADA practice statutes. In semi-retirement, Joe now serves on CTSA board and American Society of Acupuncturists committees, teaches community taiji and qigong classes, and manages his forest habitat property in northeastern Conn.
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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