Eating GMO Corn Proven To Be Hazardous To Your Health

A new study published in the International Journal of Biological Sciences showed that three different varieties of genetically modified corn from Monsanto are toxic to the liver and kidneys.

The difference between their study and the ones conducted by Monsanto? Monsanto manipulated the results of their experiment by using statistical analyses that would favor the safety of their product, as opposed to utilizing all tools available to them to fully analyze the data to determine whether or not there were signs of toxicity.

Another difference? Any sign of toxicity should have elicited a need to continue collecting data past the 90 days Monsanto had designated for the length of their study, since 90 days is no where near long enough to determine long-term effects and chronic illness. The authors of this recently published paper, on the other hand, are extending their experiment for up to two years in light of their results.

Makes me wanna smash things.

The thing that gets me is that these products have been deemed safe for human consumption based on the powerful truth that is science. However, the research itself is up for sale, whereby some laboratories have been paid to produce specific data and, conversely, paid to stop experiments when the data conflicts with what the agropharma companies want to see. It makes me angry.

Anyway, I'm done with my ranting. Just don't eat any GMO foods if you can help it, ok?

Fitting That It's Shaped Like A Frown

Hello! My name is Menaflex.

Is it a rainbow? No.
Is it a broken piece of pottery? No.
Is it part of one of those thingies that go on the inside lid of jars? No.

Is it an orthotic for shoes? Not quite... but that's a little closer.

This, my friends, wins an award for Most Anger-Inducing Thing Of The Day.

Further deteriorates my already sour view of politics.

Health Care Reform

Famous ancient Chinese physician Hua Tuo

If you follow the news at all, you've heard something about this "health care reform" thing people seem to be all excited about. You've read the editorials, you've seen the politicians speechifying. Maybe you've seen the video clips of people shouting things like "We are ALL afraid of Obama" and crying things like "I want my country back!" (What does this have to do with health care? I don't know either.) You've heard the phrases "death panels" and "public option".

So far the debate seems to be framed as "Health Care For All - For or Against?" People on both sides loudly declare the other side stupid, or evil. I'd like to point you towards a voice that asks us to focus on a different aspect of this whole debate - the very nature of the medicine that people either want to extend or not extend to the whole country.

But what's missing, tragically, is a diagnosis of the real, far more fundamental problem, which is that what's even worse than its stratospheric cost is the fact that American health care doesn't fulfill its prime directive -- it does not help people become or stay healthy. It's not a health care system at all; it's a disease management system, and making the current system cheaper and more accessible will just spread the dysfunction more broadly. -Dr. Andrew Weil: The Wrong Diagnosis at the Huffington Post

This is an extremely important point. The health care system is broken, and getting the last 40 or 50 million uninsured Americans into this same system is not going to improve the health of our nation.

It reminds me of a story I heard during my TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) education. There was a doctor in ancient China who became famous for saving lives. He could cure diseases in their most advanced state, when a patient was near death. Everyone called him a genius, some even said he had magical powers.

The doctor laughed when people praised him. "My skill is actually quite low. I can only cure disease when it has gone nearly out of control, and I have to use severe herbs and acupuncture techniques. I have two older brothers who are much better at medicine than I am."

Of course people went in search of these brothers. When they found the middle brother he said "I'm still not very good at medicine. I can only catch diseases in their initial stage. I still have to feel the pulse and look at the tongue before prescribing mild herbs and acupuncture. If you want to know real medical skill, you should find our eldest brother."

Of course the people went to search for this wonder-worker. When they found him he said "When people come to me I use neither acupuncture nor herbs. I do not feel their pulse or look at their tongue. I diagnose them by observing the color of their face and the tone of their voice. I tell them how to eat in accord with the seasons and their locations, and sometimes I give them some simple exercises to do. However, if they could sit quietly every day and listen to the natural wisdom of their own body they would not even need my advice."

The eldest brother was the only one practicing real health care - the other two were doing different forms of disease management. Of course we can't abandon those who are already in advanced disease states, but we should put equal and perhaps even more emphasis on encouraging health - what the chinese call 養生 Yang Sheng or "nourishing life."

HR 646: Acupuncture For Everyone!

Obama's 8 Principles for Health Care Reform

Read the Bill, also known as The Federal Acupuncture Coverage Act

How HR 646 can support Obama's Plan

Act now to help make it happen!

Swine Flu, Concerned Parents, Western Medicine and Chinese Medicine

Yesterday I got an email from my dad. I've been sick for the past few weeks, but what with finals and the end of school, I only got serious about treating it last Friday, when I went to see Dr. Yuhong Chen at the Yosan clinic (scroll down to read her bio). I had two acupuncture treatments and she wrote a kick-ass herbal formula, and five days later I'm back to 100%.

My main symptom was sore throat, persisting for three weeks, plus fatigue, and at various points during that four weeks I had body aches, slight fever, night sweats, thick sticky green phlegm streaked with blood, thin white phlegm, and probably something else too. It sounds bad when I write it all out, but it didn't bother me too much. All those symptoms didn't occur at the same time, and when they did occur they only lasted a day or so. The only thing that persisted was the sore throat.

In a phone conversation last weekend, my dad suggested that I go get a throat culture and, if it turned out to be strep throat, take antibiotics. I told him that I was fairly sure it wasn't strep, and even if it was, I'd rather take Chinese medicine. Like many Americans, I don't have health insurance, and my last trip to the ER cost me nearly $1000.

Then the swine flu media panic got out of control over the weekend, and I had the email exchange reproduced below with my dad. I guess I was a little defensive about Chinese medicine - after all, I just spent four years studying this completely different, completely effective system of medicine, and now my dad wants me to take antibiotics and Tamiflu? Sheesh.

But I think it's instructive about the way a lot of people feel about Chinese medicine - that's it's good for mild symptoms, but if it's "something serious," then you absolutely have to "go see a doctor," which means an M.D. The fact is, Chinese medicine can treat everything. Let me say that again: Chinese medicine can treat everything.

And now, without further ado...

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
11:54 AM (22 hours ago)
(My Dad)
to me

Hey Jonah,

Not sure if your symptoms fit this profile, but if they’re in the ballpark I would urge you to go to a clinic or even a hospital ER somewhere to get a test. This has public health implications – the only way the CDC can track what’s happening is by monitoring test results – but more important the health networks are well stocked with anti-virals (tamiflu and another one whose name I forget) that so far have been effective if the result turns out positive. So no need to panic, but also no reason not to be proactive. From the news reports it looks as if this could get serious down the line. As you have probably been reading, the group most at risk from this outbreak are healthy young adults in the 20-40 age range.

Love,

Dad



From: Lisa
Sent: Sunday, April 26, 2009 7:29 PM
Subject: IMPORTANT UPDATE! Swine Influenza Outbreak.
Importance: High

Fellow Employees:

The World Health Organization (WHO) and Center for Disease Control (CDC) have confirmed an outbreak of the Swine Influenza A/H1N1 (swine flu) in Mexico with now twenty (20) confirmed cases in the United States. Swine Influenza is a respiratory disease found in pigs caused by type A influenza that regularly causes outbreaks of influenza among pigs. CDC has determined that this swine influenza A (H1N1) virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human. However, at this time, it not known how easily the virus spreads between people.

The symptoms of swine flu in people are similar to the symptoms of regular human flu and include fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. Some people have reported diarrhea and vomiting associated with swine flu. In the past, severe illness (pneumonia and respiratory failure) and deaths have been reported with swine flu infection in people. Like seasonal flu, swine flu may cause a worsening of underlying chronic medical conditions.

Spread of this swine influenza A (H1N1) virus is thought to be happening in the same way that seasonal flu spreads. Flu viruses are spread mainly from person to person through coughing or sneezing of people with influenza. Sometimes people may become infected by touching something with flu viruses on it and then touching their mouth or nose.

Your health and the health of your family is greatly important. Please take some general precautions during this time.

Since influenza is thought to spread mainly person-to-person through coughing or sneezing of infected people, there are many things you can to do preventing getting and spreading influenza:

Everyday actions:

· Cover coughs and sneezes with tissues or by coughing into the inside of the elbow. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.

· Wash your hands often with soap and water for 20 seconds, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.

· Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs spread that way.

Try to avoid close contact with sick people.

· Limit close contact (within 6 feet) with others when possible.

· Stay away from places where there are large groups of people.

· If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

All offices remain open at this time. However, we would like to recommend that business travel to/from Mexico be delayed/re-scheduled. In lieu of travel, please consider conducting conference calls and/or video conferences.

The following link is the CDC’s Q&A which provides the detail regarding when to contact your health care provider, especially for children or someone with pre-existing health issues. http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/swineflu_you.htm

We will continue to send you updates on any important information as it becomes available. Please contact your HRBP or the Benefits Team if you have any other questions or concerns.

Regards,

Lisa
Vice President, Human Resources

--------------------------------------------------
1:23 PM (21 hours ago)
Jonah Ewell
to (My Dad)

Hey Dad,

I appreciate your concern! But I'm getting much better. Chinese medicine is much much more effective for any kind of influenza than drugs. When SARS broke out in China, they used herbal medicine. If Chinese medicine were in wider use in the Americas, swine flu would be much easier to contain. Obviously, to treat the root of the problem you need to stop having factory farming and crowding huge amounts of pigs together, which concentrates effluvia (aka pigshit!) and breeds disease. Until that happens, Chinese medicine, handwashing, and rest are the best way to recover from a flu.

I'm currently taking a Chinese herbal prescription which consists of 15 herbs. Some of the key herbs, such as 茵陳蒿 Yin Chen Hao (a type of artemisiae) and 山豆根 Shan Dou Gen (a type of sophora root) have been proven in laboratory testing to have broad-spectrum antiviral and antibacterial actions. No need to worry, Chinese medicine is on the case!

love,
Jonah
------------------------------------------------

1:53 PM (20 hours ago)
(My Dad)
to me

OK, sounds good. But do you know whether you have the particular virus that’s in the news?

Love,

Dad

---------------------------------------------------------

2:35 PM (19 hours ago)
Jonah Ewell
to (My Dad)

In the framework of Chinese medicine, it's unimportant what exact microbe or virus is causing you problems. Western science and medicine is reductionist, always looking for that ONE THING that they can point to and say is the cause of illness. When you find the exact bacteria or virus, all you have to do is kill it, or remove it, or block it, or any of the other things Western medicine does. This is a relatively recent development, hinging on the invention of advanced microscopes. Thanks to these instruments, we have made incredible advances in being able to look at and detect these small microbes and viruses, which has helped the world deal with serious health problems. However, as we are seeing, looking for the one microbe and trying to eliminate it is a textbook case of missing the forest for the trees.

What causes disease? Why do some people get sick and others don't? If the swine flu was really so contagious, why haven't more people become sick and died? According to what I've heard on the radio and read in the newspapers, less than 10% of people with swine flu have died. Over 90% recover. Think of fruit in a basket. If you leave it for awhile, you might find that one piece of fruit has mold on it. Another piece of fruit, sitting right next to it and even touching it, cheek-by-jowl, is unaffected. Why is that?

Louis Pasteur, the father of modern bacteria studies (the process of pasteurization was named for him) was said to have renounced bacteria-based medicine on his deathbed, saying "Terrain is everything." Terrain means our bodies, our immune system, our environment. If you have a strong immune system (what the Chinese call 卫气 wei qi, or defensive qi) without underlying deficiencies, and live in harmony with your environment, you will not become sick.

Chinese medicine has, over the course of 2000-3000 years of recorded history, developed a number of powerful diagnostic systems that, properly applied, can cure nearly everything. Modern medicine has a place, and it adds to the world's knowledge. But it doesn't replace Chinese medicine.

Chinese medicine looks at the totality of a person and treats the person, not the disease. The herbal formula I'm taking was written exactly for me, taking into account all my body systems, my constitution and my presenting symptoms. This is what good medicine is. Simply telling millions of people, young, old, tall, short, skinny, fat, to go dose themselves with Tamiflu is ridiculous.

If you have an epidemic situation, in Chinese medicine it falls under the general classification of 温病 wen bing, or warm disease. There are many subcategories within it, but one of note is called 杂气 za qi, or miscellaneous qi. This is a type of qi that arises under special circumstances and is outside the realm of the ordinary system of Chinese medicine, which holds that there are six types of exogenous pathogens. This seventh type of qi was discussed by 吴有性 Dr. Wu Youxing in his work the 温疫论 Wen Yi Lun in 1642 A.D., many centuries after the main classics of Chinese medicine were written but two centuries before Dr. Pasteur made his discoveries in the area of germ theory.

In other words... don't worry!

love,
Jonah

--------------------------------------------------

6:05 PM (16 hours ago)
(My Dad)
to me

In principle I can see your point, but the 1918 flu pandemic killed millions of people in a single year before it ran its course, and the treatments that have been developed since then to combat viruses of this type are pretty specific and pretty effective once the agent has been identified. Not sure of the details, but I think that anti-virals are different from antibiotics, which are less specific and also ineffective against viruses. Also, according to the NYT article on it yesterday, what makes this particular virus so deadly is not so much what it does directly as the immune reaction that it triggers, literally drowning the patient as the body tries to activate its natural defenses to meet a perceived but not well understood threat. Viruses (which are basically small free-floating pieces of genetic code) are tricky, and developing an effective anti-viral agent on the molecular level seems mostly to be a matter of strategy. So maybe the most appropriate medical text for this kind of threat would be the Sunzi…

Anyway, my 2 cents for what it’s worth.

Love,

Dad

-------------------------------------------------------

10:03 PM (12 hours ago)
Jonah Ewell
to (My Dad)

Sunzi is used as a medical text, but antiviral medications are a far cry from the wisdom of Sunzi. One of Sunzi's basic tenets is to follow the laws of Heaven and Earth. In medical terms, that means the exterior and the interior, the environment and the body. Viruses are highly adaptable, which is why getting a flu shot is such a crap shoot. They have to guess which flu strain is going to go around, and a lot of times they get it wrong, so all these old folks are immunized against something which poses no threat, and they have no defense against the flu strain that actually does come around.

They would be far, far better off to do the basics: light exercise daily, eat foods in accordance with the seasons, and have a stable emotional life. Add handwashing, proper clothing for the weather, and there's your natural flu vaccine. It's easy to tune out because it's so basic. The basics are hard! Huaching Ni says that having a normal life is actually quite difficult, and that few people ever achieve it. Instead of focusing on the basics, everyone's looking for the magic pill or injection which is going to allow them to continue with their bad habits.

The CDC is doing their job by telling people to wash their hands (http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/), but that doesn't get picked up by the media. Everyone's looking for a vaccine or treatment. As the Neijing says, treating an illness after it has started is like digging a well when you get thirsty, or forging weapons after the battle has begun.

There is an "attacking school" or "detoxification school" of Chinese medicine that concentrates on using harsh, bitter, cold herbs to drive pathogens from the body (攻邪学派 Gong Xie Xue Pai). It's one of the four famous schools of medical thought from the Jin-Yuan period. Most modern western medicine can be thought of as an extreme example of the attacking school. Antibiotics, antivirals, chemotherapy, radiation, are all very effective if used correctly (big if) but they absolutely destroy your body and leave it open to further attack. This mode of thought is just one of many overlapping theories that are used concurrently in Chinese medicine, and certainly not a dominant one.

love,
Jonah

-----------------------------------------------------
10:34 PM (11 hours ago)
Jonah Ewell
to (My Dad)

You're correct in that strategy is important, but if the only time you apply strategy is in a quest to find the best anti-viral medication, that's a misapplication of strategy. Everyone is looking through the microscope, which is fine, but if the virus is underneath a microscope that means it's not in a human body. At the same time as you bend over the microscope, you also have to step back and look at what's going on in a real live sick person, and then step back again to look at where that person lives, the state of the environment in which he or she lives, and all the people around them, sick or not. The strength of Chinese medicine is that we deal with living systems in their natural environments.

Modern machinery is great - who wouldn't want an MRI machine to peer inside the body? - but it doesn't replace the basics of the four examinations - palpation, listening/smelling, observation, and questioning. When you add blood tests, X-rays and scopes to that, you have a some very powerful diagnostic tools. If you rely too much on the machines and lab reports, as many modern doctors tend to do, you can very easily be misled. Western medicine, until very recently, made good use of palpation, physical exam, and the verbal investigation to form a complete diagnosis. Nowadays, it's just testing. Some of my patients in the clinic get sent for test after test after test. Some of these tests are very invasive, and at the end of it the doctors say, "we can't find anything wrong. It must be psychological." Well, they're looking in the wrong place, with the wrong tools, and the wrong mindset.

Livestock, Chocolate, Health Care

• From KCRA via the Fooducate blog: California may pass a bill which bans the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Great idea, if it's properly enforced. Why is it a bad idea to give cows and pigs regular doses of antibiotics? It contaminates human food and contributes to the development of drug-resistant bacteria.
  
• TCM properties of chocolate.
  
• Chinese medicine is preventive medicine. Of course, that's not all Chinese medicine can do - in China they are doing incredibly interesting stuff with herbs in the ER.

Acupuncture Awareness Day April 23rd

Acupuncture Awareness Day is coming on April 23rd. CSOMA and the AAAOM are organizing a rally in Sacramento. Check it out!

More Acupuncture vs. Chiropractic

I got a message the other day from Elie Goldschmidt, the administrator of the Medical Acupuncture Facts group on Facebook. Here it is:

I occasionally receive hate mail or email from MD's DC's who 'think' they are superior to us L.Ac.s in acupuncture and often try to spew out propaganda.

For example, here are a few things I just received from a chiropractor. If you could answer a few of his comments I will try to make a great blog post out of it. Just email it to me. Thanks!

What follows is attributed to an anonymous chiropractor:

In responce to your description of the difference between medical acupuncture and tcm style...obviously you are ill informed.

1. the training of a TCM style acupuncture actually includes roughly 300 hours of acupuncture (I did a nationwide survey of acupuncture school catalogues and phone survey).

2. the remaining hours is dealing with learning how to diagnose, qigong, tui na and of course herbal medicine which historically is thought to be superior to acupuncture.

3. I can only speak for chiropractors... I teach acupuncture at a texas chiropractic college... we have 4400 hours of medical training prior to taking the required 100 hours for the state of texas...and then an additional 300 hours that we offer. We offer acupuncture and nothing but acupuncture. we do not offer tui na, qigong or herbal medicine.

4. we study the broad spectrum of chinese acupuncture and japanese along with a 50 hour course on the ear alone. Roughly 1/2 the course is lab time practicing acupuncture techniques.

5. We do a typical medical examination with the use of labs and xray, blood tests etc and combine things like the 8 diagnostic criteria, 5 elements, etc.

6. We are in complaince with the World Health Organization regulations regarding physicians who are already trained in medicine.

7. If you are an acupuncturist..then you know as well as i do that 300 hours is more than what you would need to be competent in acupuncture.
Please stop attempting to fool the public. I have a full time acupuncunture practice in Houston and make many people well.
By the way there are 48,000 chiropractors trained in acupuncture in the U.S. practicing safe and effective acupuncture.

In the past I've said there's nothing to be gained from getting into some sort of tug-of-war with chiropractors over who can do acupuncture and who can't, and I still believe that's true.

Compared to Traditional Chinese Medicine, chiropractic is a piecemeal medical system, using the modern Western diagnostic system but treating in a different way. Modern TCM as practiced in China is much more advanced in integrating Western diagnostic tools such as blood tests, X-rays, ultrasound, MRIs, but retaining all the other traditional diagnostic tools - observation, palpation, listening/smelling, and inquiry. TCM diagnosis and Western diagnosis exist side by side, with both systems being used to deliver the best care.

The chiropractor who wrote the list above has some wrong ideas which I'll address in the coming days. But let's keep an eye on the bigger picture. Is it unsafe for chiropractors to do acupuncture? No. I'm sure they have adequate training to do it safely. As a profession, we can't credibly support the Pan-African Acupuncture Project, which gives short training courses so that local doctors can use acupuncture, and then pretend that there's something unsafe about chiropractors doing the same thing.

Is it better to visit an L.Ac (Licensed Acupuncturist) rather than a chiropractor for acupuncture? Certainly. L.Acs have much more training than chiropractors, or M.D.s, or PTs doing "dry needling" - Chinese medicine is what we're about. For us, acupuncture isn't just some side line we picked up to increase the revenue stream in the clinic.

Should you stop seeing your chiropractor, physical therapist, or M.D.? Of course not! Everyone has their place in this patchwork quilt of American health care, and there's no reason to try and put down others.

Medicine In The News

While reading the New York Times yesterday, I couldn't help but notice the increasing number of articles about health care. Could it be that all this talk of health care reform is forcing people to look at what needs to be reformed? The ideas of conflict-of-interest and professional integrity have always come up in regards to medical care versus the medical industry. I feel that the growing discontent with the current mainstream medical system has finally reached a point of some kind of public vigilante justice, bent on shaming the perpetrators into following the rules of medical ethics and propriety.

Two articles in particular had stood out: Prosecutors Plan Crackdown on Doctors Who Accept Kickbacks, and Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary. Interestingly enough, both of these articles did not make their appearance in the Health section of the Times, but rather in the Money & Policy section and Business section respectively.

The first article describes how federal prosecutors are going to start enforcing laws that make it illegal for medical doctors to accept gifts from industry. They have already been going after the pharmaceutical companies that engage in such practices, but have found that even increasing fines is not enough of a deterrent, as some of them already set aside money for fines that they know they'll need to pay for breaking these laws. Now, they're going after the medical doctors.

[...] federal health officials are forcing a growing number of drug and device makers to post publicly all payments made to doctors who serve as consultants or speakers.

That means that information about the companies that illegally market their goods as well as the doctors who they bribe will be made completely public and searchable.

The second article discusses industry influence on education. The problem that a lot of medical schools face is that a good proportion of their funding comes from private companies, and a lot of star faculty act as consultants for companies to increase the marketability of their products. But what kind of education would future doctors be getting if their instructors were all on the payroll of big pharmaceutical companies? Some would argue that it wouldn't affect their jobs as teachers, but I suspect there must be a huge bias with the dissemination of information.

Harvard medical students, as part of the American Medical Student Association, have worked to make it a requirement that all professors and lecturers disclose their industry ties in class. They are the first and only medical school to do that, which is appropriate in this age of reform because they are ranked one of the lowest in terms of transparency and control of industry money.

Here is where I would normally tie this blog post to Chinese medicine somehow... for today, I think it would be sufficient to simply say that I hope all this reform of the health care system in its final incarnation will include low-cost, low-risk, highly effective therapies - such as Chinese medicine - into the grand plan of taking care of each other.

Community Style Acupuncture

Community acupuncture is springing up all over the place. This practice model uses a sliding scale, usually $15-$45 a treatment, which allows patients to come more often. Acupuncture works best when more treatments are done in less time - 12 treatments over two weeks are usually much more effective than 12 treatments over 12 weeks.

Here's a link to a story from upstate New York.

There is no standard practice model for acupuncture and Chinese medicine. It's a young field and prices are all over the map. Some insurance covers acupuncture, some doesn't. Some acupuncturists accept insurance, some don't. Chinese medicine is not fully integrated into the mainstream health care system, and might never be. But as someone about to graduate from a 4-year TCM school, I've noticed that most acupuncturists in private practice charge between $65 and $150 per treatment.

Community style acupuncture uses a group treatment room and mostly chair acupuncture to reduce overhead. With a group treatment room, more people can be treated at one time. Having to maintain a private room for each patient reduces the number of patients one can see in any given time period.

The people who popularized community-style acupuncture, Working Class Acupuncture in Portland, bring a very stridently socialist outlook to their practice. For more, take a look at this blog entry by Lisa Rohleder, entitled "A Guide to Understanding CAN's Anger, for Any Member of the Acu-Establishment."

There are some valid points in the article, for instance:

• No one is going to hire you to be an acupuncturist. There are very few salaried jobs available to people fresh out of acupuncture school. It's an entrepreneurial profession, and will likely remain so for quite a while. (President Obama might bring substantial change to American health care - if so, I hope Chinese medicine is integrated on a wide scale so that more people can benefit.) But I knew that when I started school, as did nearly all of my classmates. I can't imagine that anyone was seduced into Chinese medicine school and then was shocked (shocked!) to discover upon graduation that they had to start their own practice.
  
  
• Chinese medicine school is expensive. Typical costs are about $65,000 over four years, not including living expenses.
  
  
• Acupuncture works best when people get more frequent treatments. True! Bob Flaws wrote a great article on this called Acupuncture and the 50-Minute Hour.
  
  
• Acupuncture should be available to people of all income levels. This is, obviously, impossible to disagree with without looking like some sort of monster. No one will say that only rich people deserve acupuncture.

I dislike the whiny tone of this article and the setting up of acupuncture schools, the NCCAOM, ACAOM and others as "the acu-establishment" that needs to be struggled against (e.g. "The heads of the larger schools and of the NCCAOM make six-figure salaries." Horrors! No one should make that much!). I grew up in Berkeley and have seen these tactics used by people with left-leaning political views nearly all of my life. Perhaps they don't realize that by indulging in this kind of "otherization," they are fostering further division and creating more problems than they solve.

I give the Community Acupuncture Network kudos for all the work they have done. Most people just whine and let it be. The people of Working Class Acupuncture have done a wonderful job of setting up a practice model that new acupuncturists can use to make a reliable income and at the same time, help so many people with their health problems. A friend graduated from acupuncture school last year and started out with the standard model, renting a room once a week from another acupuncturist, seeing three or four patients a week, trying hard to get the word out. Our online chats filled me with dread: "I'm so bored," she would say. "I'm so lonely." Is this what would happen to me when I graduated?

Then she joined a community-style acupuncture group. All of a sudden she was seeing twenty patients a day and making almost enough money to quit her "day job" that she'd had all throughout school. In addition to financial benefits, seeing so many patients gives you an incredible amount of experience. In the clinical portion of our school education, we see one patient an hour (the exception being externships, where students often work at low-cost or free clinics and see many more patients). Seeing four patients an hour forces you to make good, fast diagnoses, and the low cost means you get to see the patient the next day and the next day and adjust their treatment as the condition progresses. This is priceless.

I do take issue with one particular point: Acupuncture is easy and we should have less training. Wha-a-a?? In Lisa Rohleder's own words:

the disconnection between how simple acupuncture actually is, and how much we paid to learn it. Acupuncture and herbs are not the same thing. You can get excellent clinical results with acupuncture with a minimum of training in Chinese medical theory. After a little time working with real patients in the real world, most of us come to the conclusion that we could have learned what we needed to know about acupuncture, in order to help most people, in eighteen months of schooling, tops. Most of what we spent armloads of money to learn has no direct (or even indirect) usefulness to our patients. That curricula are designed and accredited in this way suggest to us that what patients need does not interest you.

Now, I haven't treated any "real patients in the real world" yet so maybe I'll be changing my tune after the licensing exam later this year, but really... eighteen months? Yes, sticking a needle in someone and getting the qi is a skill that can be learnt relatively quickly. But that's not all there is to acupuncture. Like tai ji, acupuncture is easy to learn but difficult to master. Any argument for less training seem counter-intuitive.

Acupuncture is also not all there is to Chinese medicine. The process of Chinese medicine starts with diagnosis. If you get the diagnosis wrong, your treatment will be wrong. I don't think you can make the case that TCM diagnosis can be learned in eighteen months with a straight face.

Rohleder does bring up an important point: the disconnect between acupuncture and herbal education. In China, acupuncture and moxibustion are a separate department of medicine. Many TCM doctors who were trained in China, including many of our professors and clinic supervisors, think that acupuncture is inferior to herbal therapy. Our education in TCM school reflects these ideas. I don't necessarily think one type of therapy is better than the other (in fact, I think exercise and a healthy emotional life is the best medicine of all), but this is how it is. Your effectiveness as an acupuncturist certainly isn't stunted by learning about herbal medicine.

There is already a short training course available which certifies one to do acupuncture after only 300 hours of training. You just have to be an M.D. first.

Acupuncture vs. Chiropractic - WHO WILL WIN THE BLOODY BATTLE???

Yes, that's a rather dramatic title. I hope you'll take it for what it is - a light-hearted poke at the way some people view the medical profession in the United States.

With a few notable exceptions, almost every chiropractor I have ever met has a huge chip on his shoulder. He feels disrespected by M.D.s. He feels put-upon. He feels like the AMA is trying to put him out of business. Not without reason: just take a look at these articles on the epic battles waged over chiropractic scope of practice in California. Doctors don't want them to be able to give a diagnosis. Physical therapists don't want them to be able to do physical therapy. Acupuncturists don't want them to be able to do acupuncture.

Part of the problem is that chiropractors don't have a separate system of diagnosis in the way that Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) does. Doctors have no reason to feel threatened by someone who says their patient has Liver Qi Stagnation or Kidney Yin Deficiency - they have no idea what that is, so they can shrug it off.

But chiropractors, for whatever reason, seem to be squarely in the targets of the medical profession. Maybe it's because they are much more likely to act like what most people think of as "doctors" - they wear white coats, order X-rays and lab reports, bill insurance at a higher rate and much more frequently than acupuncturists. Also, they get to use the title of "doctor".

So, with all that in mind, I wasn't really surprised to see an article like this one surface on the internet. The author, John Amaro, wants chiropractors to be able to use acupuncture in their practice. The article is more than 10 years old now, but take the measure of the language used:

A Warning to All States That Do Not Currently Include Acupuncture into Your Practice Act. Do it now. Time is of the essence. The acupuncture profession is dedicated and is quickly becoming a major thorn in the side of chiropractic nationally. As acupuncture becomes more and more a generally accepted therapy, it is of the utmost importance we incorporate it into our practice rights. Currently, more than 60% of the chiropractic state boards in the United States regulate the practice of acupuncture.

The article begins by throwing out a bunch of statistics about how miserable acupuncturists are at running their practices, how they're all a bunch of part-timers who don't bill insurance and make less than $30k a year. Amaro doesn't make any citations, just says it's from a study that "came across my desk." Then he amps it up even more with this:

As acupuncturists aggressively seek licensure in all states, we are now seeing the brick throwing, mud-slinging tactics of this new profession to discredit those DCs who have added acupuncture to their practice through state board regulated graduate school. Please remember, acupuncturists: DCs who have added acupuncture to their armamentarium do not have to retake anatomy, physiology and the multitude of basic science courses required in the acupuncture college. They have already done that! It is not necessary for us to sit in a college for 2,400 hours for the express purpose of retaking classes we have already been examined in by the national and state boards. Also understand that all acupuncture is not traditional Chinese medicine (TCM); there are numerous styles of acupuncture, just as there are different martial arts forms and chiropractic techniques.

The practice statistics for doctors of chiropractic are much more impressive than the ones we have just examined. I can only sense a severe case of sour grapes emanating from the acupuncturists who currently are doing everything they can politically and legislatively from allowing DCs to include acupuncture into their practice act.

John Amaro is an interesting cat. If you take a look at his biography, he's been studying acupuncture since before it was legal in the U.S. He writes a column for Acupuncture Today. So why would he throw bombs like this? I imagine it's just reflex, the habitual defensiveness that so many chiropractors fall into.

The reality is, there are plenty of patients for everyone. Let's not waste time by scrabbling over who gets to do what. I haven't yet made up my mind about who should be able to practice acupuncture. Is it wrong for chiropractors to be able to do acupuncture after 100 or 300 hours of training? To be honest, I'd love to be able to take a 300-hour course on chiropractic adjustments and then be certified to carry them out. I feel confident that after 300 hours I could perform an adjustment safely. Would I be a master? No. Would I understand chiropractic in the same way that a chiropractor does? No. But I would be able to help patients in a way that I can't do now.

Let's not even mention that ANYONE can prescribe Chinese herbs with absolutely no training whatsoever. That's a topic for another day.

Also:

Medical Acupuncture Facts
Medical Acupuncture Facts group on Facebook

AAAOM First Professional Doctorate Survey

Hello all TCM students and practitioners! Please take a moment to share your thoughts with the AAAOM about a first-professional doctorate.

• AAAOM First Professional Doctorate Survey

I think it's high time that we have a first-professional doctorate. We have so much training, so much to share with our communities, so much to contribute to the health of all Americans and people around the world, our title should match our expertise. It's frankly a little ridiculous that we go through so much school and end up with a master's degree. Here's a little comparison:

MBA	2 years	Summers off
JD (law degree)	3 years	Summers off
MD	4 years	Summers off
MSTOM (Chinese medicine degree)	4 years	STRAIGHT THROUGH FOR 4 YEARS!!!

What if I'm already licensed? Won't I look bad compared to the new TCM doctors fresh out of school? People who already have licenses shouldn't worry - we already have so many school hours, it will only take two or three more classes to get our L.Acs grandfathered in as doctors. I myself am about to graduate, so I won't benefit from this right away. It's for the benefit of the field as a whole.

I just spent two years and a whole lot of money getting my DAOM - why should I support this? The DAOM program is incredibly valuable. People who get the DAOM have gone above and beyond the requirements to advance the field. My vision is that the DAOM program will live on as a post-doctorate training program for people who want to be at the forefront of TCM research and integration with modern health care.

I'm an administrator at a TCM school - I just spent three years and countless meetings and hair-pulling getting our DAOM program up and running and accredited. Now you want me to throw that all away? As stated above, the DAOM program should become a post-doctorate research and integration degree. This is extremely valuable work for the field and essential to advancing the field. Not everyone wants to be in the public eye - some people just want to have a private practice and care for people. The DAOM should become the degree of choice for people who want to work in hospitals alongside M.D.s, in public policy alongside people with an MPH degree, in research for the NIH and yes, even private companies.

Even if you don't agree with me, take a moment to make your views known to the AAAOM. And leave a comment!

Health Insurance for Everyone

Health insurance companies seemed to have had a change of heart, announcing today that they would accept all applicants for insurance regardless of their previous health history. This would include any and all pre-existing medical conditions, such as cancer, chronic illnesses like diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and disabling injuries.

Is there a catch? Of course there is!

Insurers are pushing for mandatory coverage for everyone. In order for them to be able to handle the costs of accepting all applicants, those who are healthy should also be required to buy insurance to cover the costs of those who are not.

Universal health care is the direction we seem to be heading in, and it's about time in my opinion. The problem I see with this proposal is that mandatory purchases of insurance policies does not guarantee that the services and care I want would be covered. It also does not guarantee that individuals who need more care will necessarily get adequate coverage even if they are accepted under an insurer's plan. Also, as the cost goes up for insurance companies that accept high-cost patients, the cost of insurance coverage will go up all around. Even if the companies wouldn't incur a loss because of the increased number of individuals buying in through a mandatory insurance policy, I wouldn't put it past them to use that high-risk cost factor as an excuse to have to raise policy prices anyway.

It just seems impossible for the government to enforce mandatory purchasing of health insurance.

Regulation of prices and the enforcement of regulations are subjects that have not been mentioned much during the last two years of dueling health care plans. Politicians have given a lot of lip service to changing the state of the system, and it's a mystery how it's all going to go down in the next few years. Most insurance companies do not cover acupuncture as part of their policies, even in California where acupuncturists are considered primary care providers. As an aspiring acupuncturist, I'm concerned with what the revised health care system will include, and whether or not our role as primary care, pain management and preventative care specialists will be upheld.

Yes We Can!

There was a comparison of the two candidate's health care plans, written by the organization Doctors for Obama, highlighting the differences between them in terms of diabetes care. To tell you honestly, I didn't read the McCain part because it's written by a partisan group and probably not entirely accurate. I did read the Obama side because this is the plan that would ideally be put in place some time in the next four years. I feel like the most significant differences, and the most valuable if Barack Obama and his team can really make this happen, are payment for preventative health services and the inability for insurance companies to penalize patients with chronic illnesses - such as diabetes - with higher costs for coverage.

Everyone in San Francisco Has Health Care

Healthy San Francisco is an innovative program designed to ensure that everyone in the city and county of San Francisco, regardless of income, has access to a basic level of medical care.

Unfortunately the program doesn't cover acupuncture at this time. But if San Francisco hired just five full time acupuncturists to deliver Chinese medicine care to program participants, I guarantee you that people would be getting better faster and staying healthier longer. Everyone knows acupuncture is excellent for pain. But Chinese medicine also gets excellent results with a whole host of problems that affect public health: diabetes, addiction issues, mental health, asthma, and on and on.

Nature's Limits

I just came across a very interesting article on nature as it related to economics, sharks and politics.

Nature, in fact, places the most severe limits on animals and their behavior to make sure they stay balanced. Sharks don't have a "stop eating" mechanism in their biological blueprint. Under normal conditions sharks can't catch food fast enough to do themselves damage from over-eating. Nature has limited their ability to catch food. A shark in a feeding frenzy, however, given enough food, will eat until it quite literally bursts open like an overstuffed sausage. Its guts just explode out into the water. In some cases crazed, gut-busted sharks eat their own entrails, unable to distinguish between their innards and their kill.

What's the relevance to Chinese medicine, you ask? Chinese medicine takes nature as the all-powerful regulator. There is absolutely nothing man-made that can withstand the power of nature. If it doesn't drown you, burn you, sting you, gore you or freeze you, nature can wait you out. The power of time is on nature's side. Eventually humans will vanish from the earth, and many millions of years later even plastic will disappear. But the earth will still be here. If not the earth, then certainly the sun. If the sun itself has gone dead, the universe marches on.

Faced with this incredible power, the ancient Chinese tried to learn from and live in harmony together with nature, rather than conquer it (Grand Canal notwithstanding). The ancient maxim 天人合一 tian ren he yi or "heaven and man together as one" is an expression of this admiration and respect for nature.

One of the most basic things we as humans can do for better health is to live in harmony with the seasons. That means eating food that was grown in-season, not flown from halfway around the world. It means taking time out, at least once a season, to get away from the city, to a wilderness area where we can better appreciate nature's glory. It means dressing appropriately for the seasons and not letting our homes or cars become completely insulated from the outside environment - turn off your air conditioning!

Over-The-Counter Medicine Ban for Children

Facts about children:

• They are dirty

• They like to stick things in their mouths

• They are little sacks of germs that get colds all the time, and pass them amongst each other because they are dirty and like to stick things in their mouths

Facts about colds:

• Most colds clear up on their own after a few days

• The best remedy for a cold is rest and fluids

Facts about over-the-counter cold medications for children:

• They were approved by the FDA only 30 years ago without any separate studies done to prove their safety or efficacy in children

• To date, there are still no studies that show the medications to be effective, even though there have been some research into the serious side effects (such as death in some cases)

• Thousands of children are sent to the emergency room every year from the administration of these drugs

• There is very little known about what the potential unknown side effects of these drugs are

• Despite the urgings of the American Academy of Pediatrics and Food and Drug Administration officials to remove these OTC cold remedies from the market, they are still being manufactured and sold across the country

• Families in the US spend over $286 million a year on these cough and cold medications for kids, of which there are over 800 different kinds on the market... That's a big market!

Good Job, America!

The American Hospital Association reports that more and more hospitals are offering some type of complementary or alternative medicine. The number one reason? You asked for it!

The number two reason? It works! Or, as they say in medical language, "clinical effectiveness."

If your hospital or health group doesn't offer acupuncture, ask for it and they will respond! In America's non-governmental medical landscape, the market supposedly determines what is best for patients and responds accordingly. That means you've got to vote with your dollars. Tell your doctor, or better yet your hospital administrator, your insurance rep, that you want acupuncture, and if you can't get it at the hospital you'll go outside the insurance system to get it.

How Much Sugar Should I Eat?

The short answer is: just a little.

The long answer? Well, you could turn to this misleading website by the Corn Refiner's Association for some incomplete answers on the "benefits" of high fructose corn syrup (thanks to Jason Moskovitz for the link). For instance, in the Q&A section, there's this helpful information...

Why do we crave sweetness?
People have evolved from the hunter-gatherers when sweetness indicated that a food was safe to eat. Sweetness was and still is a key taste marker to survival and good health. Sugars as carbohydrates are an important supply of energy to the body. This energy was essential to our survival in our not-so-distant, hunter-gatherer past. However, over the last 12,000 years our way of life has changed significantly. In contrast to our past, an abundance of calories is not essential, but the craving for sweet things remains.

If you can get past the appalling grammar, you may notice the stunted logic and historical inaccuracies. The one sentence that I agree with states that life has changed significantly over the past 12,000 years. We do still have hunter-gatherer instincts. But if you're hunting the aisles of a typical American supermarket for sustenance, sweetness is not a "key taste marker to survival". In fact, avoiding sweetness in this context will help you avoid many of the major "diseases of affluence" (those caused by too much of something rather than too little) such as diabetes.

This site is obviously designed to put you at ease as you wash down your Lil Debbie snack cakes with Dr. Pepper, but regular sugar is not so great either. I went through a phase where I wouldn't drink sodas made with corn syrup, only those made with real sugar. For some reason I thought I was being healthy - and then I realized that I was drinking way more soda than I usually did.

The corn syrup site also bad mouths supposedly natural sweeteners such as concentrated white grape juice. I have to admit that I was taken in by this sweetener at first, particularly in jam and jelly. I found this brand that was sweetened with fruit juice, and I thought "great! natural!". Again, it's what they leave out that gets you. The fruit juice they use is concentrated to such a degree that it's not much better than regular sugar.

The existence of this site is a testament to the popularity of books like Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Greg Critser's Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World. (The latter book is where I learned about Earl Butz, pictured above. He was Nixon's agriculture secretary and was chiefly responsible for the increase in corn subsidies to ridiculous levels, which in turn ensured the huge surplus of corn that led to the synthesizing of high fructose corn syrup and its subsequent injection into nearly every single packaged item on your supermarket shelf.) Just be aware that the Corn Refiners Association has millions and millions of dollars invested in getting you to eat more crap.

So, where should you get your sugars? Here's an idea: from whole food (which you can get at many places besides the overpriced Whole Foods Market). If you crave something sweet, try eating a piece of fruit. I remember when I was growing up there was always a fruit bowl around. Keep some fruit around all the time and you'll always have sweetness. Another thing you can do is chew your whole-grain rice more completely. Sugars are simple carbohydrates. When you chew your rice or sweet potato or whatever you prefer, salivary amylase breaks down starch into sugar. If you chew incompletely, you don't get the benefit of the full digestive process.

Sweetness is important. In Chinese medicine, the sweet flavor is associated with the earth phase, which in turn relates to the spleen, pancreas, stomach, and the colors yellow and orange. A nice piece of fruit for dessert lifts the digestive energy, or spleen qi.

So don't run from sweetness - run from added sugars both natural and artificial! Most of you have no need of them. By habit many of us are used to eating much more sugar than we need. If you can break the habit, you'll be much healthier!

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