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We at Acupuncture Today wish you the happiest of holidays and a prosperous new year. I would like to thank our columnists and contributors, who have written so many words of wisdom and education this past year. The acupuncture and Oriental medicine community has used much of this information in…

Hopeful would-be California acupuncture licensees got a shock on Saturday, Sept. 8, 2007, when they opened letters from the California Acupuncture Board just over a month after they’d taken the grueling California acupuncture licensing exam. Instead of indicating whether they had passed the exam, the California Acupuncture Board told them…

One of the biggest gold standards for efficacy in scientific research is the double-blind study. When both patients and practitioners are blinded to treatment method, there can be no bias from expectation or attitude. While there have been a number of well-designed, single-blind acupuncture studies in which the patient was…

The 25 th anniversary of acupuncture and Oriental medicine as an organized profession in the United States was celebrated in Portland, Ore., at the annual AAAOM Conference and Expo. The anniversary was shared by the AAAOM, ACAOM, CCAOM and NCCAOM.

This past year has been an eventful one for the AAAOM - beginning, of course, with the rebirth of the organization in January 2007, when the AAOM and the AOM announced they would begin operating as a single entity after 14 years. Recently, AAAOM President Leslie McGee, RN, LAc, took…

Oriental medical practitioners evaluate by asking, looking, listening and even smelling the patient. The signs and symptoms derived from these methods are indicators of disharmonies of the patient’s qi dynamic. When considering that signs and symptoms provide an indirect understanding of the patient’s qi dynamic, the question arises if we,…

I have probably one of the toughest jobs in medicine. I am a small-town acupuncturist. I was unprepared for small-town acupuncture at first. The idea had never even crossed my mind. No one taught me about it in school, and much of the practice advice I read in the journals…

The following is an interview with Dr. Diane Cridennda, leading specialist in the integrative field of fertility and TCM. I had the opportunity to meet with her in her office in Colorado Springs, Colo. Thank you, Diane, for your cutting-edge work in this field!

In 1970, on my return to civilian duty, having served in the U.S. Army as a combat medic, I became one of the first newly formed paramedics in the nation while I was trying to earn enough money to afford to enter into practice. As a result of my interest…

There is a curiosity in Western science regarding Chinese medicinal diagnosis of, and treatment for, urinary bladder stones, a very painful condition affecting many Americans. Since the discovery of lithotripsy (breaking down a calculus in the urinary system into pieces small enough to be washed out), the profession of urology…

Pertussis, or whooping cough, “is an acute, highly communicable infection of the respiratory tract caused by Bordetella pertussis . B pertussis organisms attach to the ciliated respiratory epithelium and multiply there.” 1 The disease has an insidious onset. Initial symptoms include rhinitis, sneezing, cough and possibly fever. After a couple…

The Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (ACAOM) has put out a call for public comment on its “Draft Standards for First Professional Doctoral Programs in AOM.” The proposed requirements are a comprehensive set of accreditation standards that would focus on institutional, program and student learning outcomes expected of…

Many people in Oriental thought, be it medicine, qigong or martial arts, honor tradition. That is fine; we should honor the past, but we don’t want to get stuck there. Studying the classics should be a requirement for acupuncturists, but exploring how to apply our time-honored wisdom to the present…

When we take the oral temperature of a person, if it is much hotter than the normal temperature of 98.6 F°, then we know they are sick. Similarly, when we take infrared images of a patient and find hot spots on the body surface, it generally means some kind of…

In my last column, I discussed the importance of understanding the contributing role diet and lifestyle play in the disease process. In this article, I would like to continue this discussion by examining a case study in which food therapy played a crucial role in the healing process. The interesting…

The year 2007 marks the 20th anniversary of the Kang Wen Acupuncture Clinic in Seattle. This “golden” time is reflected in the clinic’s ability to be malleable and ductile in the face of funding challenges, while continuing to tonify and nourish the public’s health in the Puget Sound region. Founded…

Acupuncturists are a passionate bunch. We take our work seriously. I was recently sitting with a group of colleagues, and a non-practitioner was questioning us: “If it is so challenging to build this profession, what were we all so gung-ho about? Why were we grappling with each state’s legal structure,…

It does not seem possible that 2007 is drawing to a close. Time has passed so quickly. For me, the start of autumn has been a time to attend seminars. Tony Robbins reminds us that we must grow, which is why the information presented in the seminars and symposiums I…

Tutorial training in Chinese medicine is the time-honored tradition from which all modern teaching methods and curricula in acupuncture schools have evolved. Tutorial training is the traditional origin of everything you are learning in your schooling, reading and practice.

One of the most important goals for teachers, parents and school administrators is creating a healthy emotional environment for students. A study published in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Chinese Medicine has found that including a particular type of qigong exercise program helped calm and energize the…