Dr. Thomas Hodge is an associate clinician working alongside Dr. Jason Hao in their Santa Fe clinic where they specialize in the treatment of neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease and the sequela of stroke. In addition to his work with Dr. Hao, Dr. Hodge's clinical experiences include Christus St. Vincent's Cancer Center and Rehabilitation Center, and Santa Fe Indian Hospital. He is an executive board member of Neuro-acupuncture Institute 501(c)3 and a member of the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies' subcommittee for brain research.
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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