Kristen E. Porter, PhD, MS, MAc, LAc is a social entreprenuer, gerontologist, and acupuncturist. She founded Zen Executive, LLC, to provide marketing support to holistic practitioners. Her gerontological research includes the study of CAM and aging, HIV/AIDS, and minority aging. Her two decades in integrated health included 16 years as a director at Pathways to Wellness, the creation of 15 hospital-based acupuncture programs, and NCCAM funded research on acupuncture, HIV/AIDS and substance abuse.
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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