Misha Ruth Cohen, OMD, LAc, has practiced Asian traditional medicine for 25 years. She is the director of Chicken Soup Chinese Medicine; Research and Education Chair for Quan Yin Healing Arts Center; and a research specialist at the UC San Francisco Institute for Health and Aging. Dr. Cohen has lectured throughout the world and is a respected expert in chronic diseases and Chinese medicine. She has spent the past 19 years researching and developing comprehensive programs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, HCV, cancer and related disorders. She is the co-author, along with Dr. Robert Gish, of the Hepatitis C Help Book, published by St. Martin's.
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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