Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed House Bill 2615 into law on Friday, May 13, 2016. HB2615 includes provisions for the licensure of acupuncturists in the state of Kansas. Previously, untrained and inexperienced practitioners had equal footing to perform acupuncture as fully trained and nationally certified acupuncturists, creating unnecessary risk to Kansas patients seeking alternative treatments.
The bill requires Kansas acupuncturists to complete a nationally accredited certification program, pass national exams, and carry professional liability insurance. Prior to the bill, Kansas acupuncturists existed in a legal gray area outside the provisions of the KS Healing Arts Act and left Kansans in the dark about practitioners when exploring complementary treatment. Now Kansas residents will be able to look for the title "Licensed Acupuncturist" or "L.Ac." to indicate national and state professional standards have been met.
Acupuncture supporters hope licensing will help more Kansas residents have confidence to try this safe complementary treatment alongside traditional treatments. "Most people have heard of using acupuncture to treat pain," said Kansas Association of Oriental Medicine President Sandra Wilkes, "we need to bring acupuncture into the forefront of the minds of patients and their doctor's, so they consider acupuncture before they go to opioids."
The bill does not restrict other licensed medical professionals from performing acupuncture, does not carry an insurance mandate, and does not affect the Kansas budget. HB2615 goes into effect July 1, 2016.
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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