Professor Lixing Lao, president of the Virginia University of Integrative Medicine, is also the current vice president of the World Federation of Acupuncture and Moxibustion Societies. He is the former director of the School of Chinese Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (2013-2019), and served as a professor of family medicine and director of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Program in the Center for Integrative Medicine of the School of Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), until 2013. Prof. Lao graduated from the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in 1983 and completed his PhD in physiology at UMB in 1992. He has served as the principal investigator / co-investigator of more than 20 clinical trials and preclinical studies in acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Department of Defense (DoD), and the Medical and Health Research Fund (MHRF) in Hong Kong.
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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