The Facial Acupuncture column is a collaborative effort of several acupuncturists who are pioneers in the field of "healthy living." Sunanda Harrell-Stokes is one of those pioneers, having co-created the Marisanda√∫ constitutional facial protocol. Since 1973, she has offered a unique combination of scientific and humanistic skills gained from a background in microbiology, psychotherapy, wholistic health and Oriental medicine.
Sunanda is licensed as an acupuncturist in four states and is certified by the NCCAOM. She is a graduate of Syracuse University and the Academy of Chinese Culture and Health Sciences, and has completed advance work in traditional Chinese medicine at Nanjing College in the People's Republic of China. She has studied facial diagnosis, acupressure and acupuncture for facial rejuvenation with Lillian Garnier, Shogo Mochizuki, Alex Tiberi and Mary Elizabeth Wakefield. Sunanda's practice focuses on biological individuality applied to conditions related to aging; stress; PMS; menopause; sinusitis; headaches; and musculoskeletal pain.
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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