Laura Christensen graduated from Oberlin College in 1982 with an AB in Biology and pre-medical studies. While there she also studied cello in the Oberlin Conservatory. Upon graduating she began working as a research assistant at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, one of the Harvard Hospitals. She did research in gastroenterology, neurosurgery, and behavioral medicine (working under Herbert Benson MD) full time while studying acupuncture full time. She graduated from the New England School of Acupuncture with a MAc in 1984 and continued on to get her MA in Counseling Psychology from Lesley University in 1986. She practiced as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in the Boston area till 1991 and then moved to the town where she grew up, Iowa City, IA. She comes from a family of physicians, scientists, gardeners, and musicians. While persuing research in psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, she began practicing acupuncture in 1992. She studied Chinese Herbal medicine in a two year program with Ken Morris of Oakland, CA. She then studied Japanese Acupuncture and Shang Han Lun with Dr. Miki Shima for several years, while also studying with Susan Johnson (Tong Style) and Sharon Weizenbaum (herbology). She has studied Japanese Acupuncture with Kiiko Matsumoto and David Euler since 2007 and continues her studies with Sharon Weizenbaum in the Graduate Mentorship Program for the second time. Her area of interest in the professional activity of acupuncturists is ethics, and she is curious about the subtle dynamics that can lead to ethical dilemmas for us. In her busy practice she treats a wide variety of types of illness with a variety of approaches. She is married and in her free time she enjoys taking courses and traveling, dogs, cooking, gardening, knitting, and music.
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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