Tiffany Tuftee serves as the president of CSOMA as of 2024. A steadfast advocate for East Asian medicine, she is deeply committed to advancing the practice of acupuncture in California. Her initiatives focus on creating job opportunities, enhancing sustainability within the profession, and educating allied health care practitioners on the essential role acupuncture plays in modern health care. Under her leadership, CSOMA is dedicated to ensuring that acupuncture remains a vital component of the state’s health care system, promoting comprehensive and holistic patient care. Contact email: president@csomaonline.org.
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.
| Digital Exclusive
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?
| Digital Exclusive