Stephen Lee has been practicing acupuncture and Chinese medicine for more than 30 years in the U.K., and is the author of the Electroacupuncture Handbook (www.jcm.co.uk/book-shop). He studied at the College of Traditional Acupuncture in Leamington Spa, U.K., in the early '80s and then studied TCM in London. He worked in the Nanjing College of Chinese Medicine, China, in 1987, before completing a two-year course in Chinese herbal medicine at the School of Chinese Medicine in London. He has been teaching workshops on electroacupuncture for musculoskeletal problems in the U.K. and abroad since 2009, and is a member of the British Acupuncture Council and the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine.
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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