One of the leading proponents of facial renewal techniques in the world today, Ms. Wakefield was recently named 2005 Educator of the Year by the American Association of Oriental Medicine at their Annual Conference and Exposition for her contributions to the field of Oriental medicine as a teacher, creator of innovative treatment protocols, writer for acupuncture periodicals, and advocate of acupuncture in the national media. Ms. Wakefield has recently been named to the faculty of Acupuncture and Integrative Medicine College (AIMC) in Berkeley, CA, in connection with her supervision of a mentorship program for facial acupuncturists.
Mary Elizabeth contributes an ongoing column on facial acupuncture and related topics to Acupuncture Today magazine, and has written articles for California Journal of Oriental Medicine and Oriental Medicine Journal. Her practice and treatment protocols have been featured in a number of prominent periodicals - Oriental Medicine Journal, Qi Magazine, Alternative Medicine - as well as in the national media, including an appearance on the Discovery Channel, in which she demonstrated her Diamond Acupuncture Facial‚Ñ¢ which debuted at the 2005 Academy Awards.
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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