Kabba Anand, DAc, LAc, Dipl. Ac., Dipl. CH, has been in private practice since 1987, and regularly contributes to Acupuncture Today. He maintains active memberships in several professional organizations, including the Society for Acupuncture Research, the National Qigong Association, and Turning Point Cancer Center, which promotes an integrated approach to preventing and responding to cancer. He served for three years as chair for the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.
Kabba served as an acupuncture advisory board member for a research study titled "Physical CAM Therapies for Chronic Low Back Pain" for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), as well as an acupuncturist member and safety expert at the Clinical Training and Monitoring Center for an NCCAM study entitled "Efficacy of Acupuncture for Chronic Low Back Pain."
In 1997, Kabba helped research and draft legislation reintroducing acupuncture coverage under motor vehicle insurance in Hawaii. He cofounded and currently serves as president of AcuPlan Hawaii, the state's first acupuncture independent practice association (IPA), which negotiates contracts with third-party payors and sponsors continuing education seminars.
Kabba pioneered the inclusion of acupuncture and Oriental medicine at Maui Memorial Medical Center (MMMC), which became one of the first state hospitals in Hawaii to credential acupuncturists. His efforts led to medical staff privileges for acupuncturists, massage therapists, chiropractors and naturopaths. He currently is in private practice in Hawaii, where he teaches qigong and meditation. He enjoys filmmaking, writing, music, dance, kayaking, surfing, swimming, hiking and mountain biking.
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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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