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Wellness seems to be the current buzzword on everyone’s lips. The larger question, however, is precisely what will be needed to truly achieve wellness. On Feb. 23, 2009, concurrent with the Institute of Medicine’s Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public (see the Public Health column), two…

Steven

When I decided to write this piece about Risk Management, I spoke with a couple of people in the department that came to me for treatment, as all hospital staff (and, as you will see later, all county workers) could do. I told them about some early disturbing experiences and…

In part one of this article (December 2008), I discussed the possibility of making a shift in our basic clinical viewpoint that involves discovering and seeing the place of basic wellness, and even goodness in our clients, and then building our treatments from that premise. If they are alive, these…

A headline caught my attention: “Economy Takes Toll on Mental Health.” It described the recent phenomena of San Francisco Bay Area psychologists and other mental health therapists seeing the effects of the recent economic events impacting their patient’s lives. One local therapist said, “Last week every one of my clients…

ACTCM Vice President Represented at Conference and OCOM Reduces Clinic Fees.

If you are an acupuncturist looking for ways to grow your private practice, we encourage you to do a little market research and see what other practitioners are doing to promote themselves. If you surf the Web or look at various display ads, you’ll probably notice rather quickly that most…

One of the most intrigue puzzles in Chinese medicine is that nobody has yet found any trace of meridians, despite the incredible usefulness of meridians in diagnosis and treatment of diseases. We favor the explanation that meridians are made up of aligned stable water clusters that have an electric dipole…

This is the intention for which I feel some acupuncturists long, with phrases such as “We need to be recognized as an equal in the profession,” or “We should be given the same stature as an allopathic physician.” Should we be responsible for bringing our Western medical knowledge up to…

As you are reading this article, the 2009 Spring Flush (harvest) should be well underway. According to the Chinese lunar calendar, there are predictions of an early spring season. My first tea tour of the year will be spent watching thousands of villagers out laboring in the fields, valleys and…

In the November 2008 issue of Acupuncture Today, of 182 respondents to the question of Do you want more articles on practice building, 90 percent were interested in more information. Sometimes I am truly amazed at the apparent apathy within the profession in regard to the need to develop ongoing…

An ovarian cyst is an abnormal collection of fluid (clear or bloody) with a thin wall that can appear in or on an ovary.1 They range in size from 2 mm to greater than 10 cm; from the size of a pea to a cantaloupe. They are almost always benign,…

Cell phones do not belong in the treatment room unless they are turned off. While I was having lunch the other day with several acupuncture friends of mine, the horror stories about cell phone use in the treatment room monopolized the conversation. Read on to see just the sorts of…

I am very excited to note that last two major changes to diagnosis codes (2007 and 2009) included new codes for the diagnosis of pain and headaches. For 2009, there are 35 new and updated ICD-9 codes for headaches and three new CPT procedure codes for injections (note that there…

As a practicing acupuncturist, I find that I continually wonder how a few well-placed needles can have such transformative results in my patients. Over the past 10 years I have read explanations that vary from the vague and mystical idea that the needles move qi in the meridians to scientific…

Recently, I have received several requests for information on battlefield acupuncture. The term battlefield acupuncture was first used in 2001 by my friend and colleague Col. Richard Niemtzow MD, PhD, who serves as a consultant for complementary and alternative medicine to the Surgeon General of the Air Force. I have…

America has a voracious appetite for goods and services. We are told that if some is good, more must always be better. Our modern economy produces a constant flow of stimulating experiences. Such interactions generate internal transactions. These transactions then yield influences that are integrated into postnatal qi (qi and…

The Random House dictionary defines the word ancestor as “a person who serves as an influence of model for another; one from whom mental, artistic, traditional and spiritual ideas, information and values descent is claimed.” In Asian medicine, this bears truth. Ancestry is most important. A big plus of traditional…

On Feb, 20, 2009, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the 2009-2010 California state budget approved by the legislature earlier in the week. Schwarzenegger’s stamp of approval finally brought to a close what was a grueling 106 days with no state budget, where the fate of public-works projects and state employees’…

While the future of acupuncture legislation at a federal level under the new Obama administration is still unknown, several states are taking the initiative and moving forward with bills. These bills range from establishing an acupuncture quality assurance commission to regulation of Asian-bodywork practitioners to establishing licensure. Here is a…