Kevin V. Ergil is a professor at Finger Lakes School of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, New York Chiropractic College. He is a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine (licensed in N.Y. and Calif.), as well as an anthropologist. He is a past president of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, San Francisco (1990-1992) and was the founding Dean of the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, New York Campus (1992-1998). He's also a member of the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (NCCAOM) and a fellow of the National Academy of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (FNAAOM).
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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