Dr. McCormick Templeman is an author and college professor with a background in traditional Chinese medicine. She holds an MSOM from AIMC Berkeley and a DACM from Pacific College of Health and Science. Her books have been published by multiple Penguin Random House imprints, and her short writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and CJOM (now JAIM). A graduate of Reed College, she has a PhD in English and literary studies from the University of Denver, and teaches at Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Va.
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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