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All medical systems have clumsiness in them. If the technique isn’t, the practitioner is. Everyone in every form of medicine is striving to improve. That is why we call it practice. While we may balk at the 100,000 deaths that will happen in the U.S. this year from properly prescribed…

Former President Ronald Regan said, “When the tide rises all boats float.” The tide is rising for the acupuncture profession. Many forces outside the profession are helping the tides to rise.

Pacific College of Oriental Medicine (PCOM) recently announce it has received regional accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). This achievement reflects five years of hard work on the part of faculty, staff, and students. WASC commended the college for its commitment to quality improvement, its shareholders…

In the educational experience of most healthcare practitioners, business and marketing are overlooked topics. Therefore, when you graduate with your certificate, degree, or diploma, you may be very skilled in your chosen discipline, but feel ill-equipped to run and market your healthcare practice. Remember, your practice is a business and…

My Masters thesis was titled, “The Challenges of Integrating Eastern and Western Medicine,” which highlighted several reasons why it is hard for these two worlds to mix. On the other hand, it gives some practical advice and examples on how to effectively integrate so one knows it is not unattainable.…

Recently, Matteo* (a transgender male) approached me during a break in an advanced shiatsu class in Berlin where he was one of two men in a group of 20 women. “Pamela. Don’t forget to remind the translator to include male endings.” And that’s when it hit me and I realized…

As acupuncture and traditional East Asian medicine continue to intersect and integrate with biomedical approaches, the conversation about integration expands and becomes richer. One forum for these conversations is the Academic Consortium of Complementary and Alternative Health Care (ACCAHC).

I do not care what the truth is, one way or another; I just want to know it. And when it comes to dietary supplements, the truth can be hard to find for a number of reasons. When a recent headline stated that multivitamins are a waste of money,1 it…

Supervising acupuncture interns at a TCM college, it has always struck me how funny it is to hear the clinic manager tell the patients that the Five Element clinic specializes in treating emotions, as if patients with physical pain have no emotions! The Five Element school believes that the body,…

Many people are drawn to cannabis for its effects physically, mentally and emotionally. Medically, cannabis has some legitimate uses, however the scope of this article is limited to the recreational use of cannabis. The following is distilled from a lecture given by Marco Lam of Boulder, Colo.

I was first introduced to the work of Gil Hedley by Tom DiFerdinando. He gifted me Gil’s DVD series. Within in the first ten minutes of watching Gil “de-layer” the body, from the total skin layer down to our visceral core, my view and understanding of the way in which…

Chinese medicine speaks of alignment between humans, heaven and earth. It is a complex view with a focus upon relationship. These are comprehensive ideas with no specific terms in contemporary medical practice. Here, I want to expand upon the attempts to transform conventional biomedicine into a more sensitive and socially…

In 2013 and 2014, the theme was “the money is in the list.” This meant that if you had a big email list, you were really making some “cha-ching.” Unfortunately, having thousands of emails doesn’t equate to thousands of dollars in profit.

These times are changing, and changing quickly. There have been many challenges to this profession throughout the past few years. The challenge is to talk, then talk and talk some more about this medicine.

In the medieval town of Rothenburg, deep set within the Bavarian countryside in Southern Germany, the TCM Kongress Rothenburg each year draws around 1.200 participants from more than 40 different countries to attend the biggest TCM conference in the Western world.

This excerpt is reprinted with permission from Jamie Wu. TCM Case Studies: Pediatrics was released in 2014 by People’s Medical Publishing House. Dr. Wu Qian-zhi, Vice President of Faculty at AOMA Graduate School of Integrative Medicine in Austin, Texas, and Dr. Wang Meng-qing, Chief Physician and Director of the TCM…

More often than not, when a patient presents to the office, it is for a pain complaint. Headache, neck pain, low back pain, sciatica, carpal tunnel… The pain is often the focus of the patient’s mindset, and they don’t often have any thought of what comes after the pain. When…

Michael

Abbye

Gerd