Niloo Nikpour immigrated to the United States from Iran with her husband and daughter in 1986. She worked as a gas station attendant to finance her master’s degree in economics, eventually becoming a corporate economist for nearly 20 years. Then, after picking up a book of Tao from a bookstore and experiencing a moment of clarity, she resigned from her corporate job. She began practicing yoga and meditation, spent the next 10 years learning from Lao Tsu, Chuang Tsu, Rumi and Carl Jung as her primordial teachers, and began studying TCM and herbal medicine at Emperor’s College. Together with her daughter, Catherine, they envision opening an acupuncture and wellness center for holistic healing, where people can receive love, hope, courage, and the power to heal their body, mind, and spirit.
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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