John Weeks has worked in various writing, organizing and executive capacities in integrative health for more than 30 years. His Integrator Blog News & Reports (www.theintegratorblog.com) is widely regarded as the top leadership-oriented resource on the policy and business of integrative health. A prolific organizer, Weeks convened the Integrative Medicine Industry Leadership Summits (2000-2002); directed the National Education Dialogue to Advance Integrated Care (2004-2006); fund-raised the start-up and was on the founding steering committee of the Integrative Health Policy Consortium (2002-; co-founded the Academic Collaborative for Integrative Health (and directed from 2007-2015; and was on the founding board of the Academy of Integrative Medicine and Health.
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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