Wei (Vivien) Zhang, licensed acupuncturist and certified Chinese herbalist, is the first acupuncturist at the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine of Mass. General Hospital; and also serves as a medical staff member of Emerson Hospital. As her new endeavor, she is working on integrative treatments for autism and other brain development-related conditions with Dr. Martha Herbert, a pediatric neurologist and brain development researcher, and Dr. June Kong, a primary care physician. Wei was a professor of New England School of Acupuncture from 1999-2008 before dedicating herself to full-time clinical care. She received her medical degree from Beijing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and master's degree in nutrition and health promotion from Simmons College.
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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