What a weekend!

​This past weekend was the second module in the Chinese Herbal Dermatology certification course I'm taking :) Those 3 loooooong days are rough, but the information is so great! 

This module, we learned all about Viral Warts, Peri-oral Dermatitis, Stasis Eczema, Lichen Planus, Rosacea, Pompholyx Eczema and Herpes Simplex. (You'll notice Herpes Zoster on the content list, but we ran out of time and will complete it next module ;)  )

​I'm super excited to get better at helping you guys heal from your skin conditions <3

A new study has been published that used CT scans to reveal differences between acupuncture points and non-acupuncture points.  Click here to read more about it!

How freakin' cool is it that 5000 years ago the ancient Chinese knew that there was something special about certain parts of the body and that these points could be used to restore health? How did they figure it out?  I am loving that science is finally figuring out ways to look at our bodies to see what the ancients somehow knew so long ago!

Okay, I'm going to geek out for a minute here.  This is so freakin' neat!

Scientists have found that Oxygen levels are higher at acupoints.  Using an oxygen sensor, they made the picture to the left.  It's really small, so a bit difficult to read, but the yellow/orange/red areas are the areas of increased oxygen levels.  Those areas are the acupuncture points of the forearm!

I can't wait until scientists examine the entire body in this fashion!

Plus, it makes for really pretty art.  You can bet that a full-body scan would be hung on the wall at my office!

My goodness, biomedicine and science are cool!  I just finished reading this article about a woman who had an ovarian transplant and successfully had two children as a result.

I know this brings up ethical questions, but in her case, it does not, for me.  She was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 27 and underwent chemotherapy which almost always forces women into menopause.  This was the case with her, and at such a young age!  Her doctors had the foresight to harvest one of her ovaries prior to treatment and freeze it. 


She got through her cancer treatment, is cancer-free and because of biomedicine and science was able to have biological children, even though cancer tried to rob her of that ability.


I know that this has nothing to do with natural medicine, but I just wanted to share with you all this story of one of the many strengths of biomedicine.  Healthcare is not a one-method-fits-all sort of thing!

Yay! I was really excited to read this article in Acupuncture Today.

More and more biomedical schools are teaching elective courses on integrative medicine. As of November 2008, 113 of the nation's 126 medical school have such electives available! These courses are designed to bring to our future doctors information about what types of therapies their future patients are going to be using to improve their health.

Integrative medicine is the practice of combining the best of all of the medical fields (biomedicine, acupuncture, massage, chiropractic, etc.) in order to get the best results for a patient with the least amount of intervention.

If acupuncture will help your back pain? Great! If not, maybe another therapy will. Maybe your only answer will be pain medications. However, let's start with something like acupuncture, massage or chiropractic medicine to see if they'll work.

If you've got pneumonia, let's not mess around with herbs (while they CAN work, they're not as effective as antibiotics), let's go straight to antibiotics, get you better, then use acupuncture and Chinese herbs to help your recovery time and address underlying deficiencies that may have predisposed you to illness in the first place.

These electives are not used to teach students HOW to use complimentary therapies, but rather when to refer to the appropriate complimentary medical specialist. Kudos to these medical schools for finally getting it. No one can be the Jack-of-all-trades healer. We WANT practitioners who are experts in their field who communicate with other experts.

It's all about the communication and knowing that there are many ways to help people thrive. We all need to help our patients find the treatments that work best for them.

So I did a search on Google for acupuncture today and was reading through some articles. Some were on the latest research. Some were on a new clinic that just opened up somewhere on the east coast. Some were written by acupuncturists who went through "Medical Acupuncture" training. This last group were the ones that caught my eye today and have spurred on this post. First off, I want to write a little bit of a disclaimer. I'm getting ready to hop up on my soapbox here, so if you're not interested, just close your browser window now ;)

And now, let the games begin!

First off, a little background on "Medical Acupuncture." Medical acupuncture is the result of biomedicine taking acupuncture and using it for their own purposes. They've seen that huge amounts of people get acupuncture done on a regular basis. They've seen that these people have had sometimes miraculous results. They've taken acupuncture and stripped it of its system (because Qi, Yin and Yang are faniciful, magical theories that can't exist) and turned it into a set of recipes. For pain you do this set of points. For nausea - this set. For diarrhea yet another set. There isn't a great amount of attention paid to the Chinese medical diagnosis, as there is to the symptoms. Biomedicine has found through research that certain points are used often in treating certain conditions and feels that all of the "magical" theory of Qi, Yin and Yang can be discarded. Sounds familiar, right? That's what biomedicine does! They want to find the active ingredient in order to turn it into a marketable pill. Forget that there may be other ingredients that are working with the active ingredient to make it even more powerful!

For the record, I don't actually have a problem with "Medical Acupuncture." People who practice this style of acupuncture get results and patients DO feel better!

However. Yes, there's a however. (You should know me by now!) This system of acupuncture has been watered down, and I think the results get watered down in the process as well. By ignoring the theories of Chinese medicine, you leave out its main purpose - to treat not just the symptoms, but the body as a whole.

Chinese medicine has been in existence for at least 5000 years. The system has been tried and true and is still used as a MAJOR form of healthcare in China. Can't we just leave it at that? Do we HAVE to know HOW it works? We know from reasearch that acupuncture releases endorphins. We know that it effects our nervous system. However, science still can't explain HOW it works. Acupuncture may effect nerves and endorphins, but it goes beyond that, and science can't figure out what "that" is!

I'm not saying stop the research. Not at all. What I'm saying is that researchers and those reading the studies need to understand that there's more working here than endorphins and neurons, and that the system doesn't work by using just one point! When you read a study that says, "this point doesn't work for that symptom," please keep in mind that no point is meant to work in isolation. Acupuncture is a system, not a pill. Also, "that point" may not work on everyone with "that symptom," because not every patient has the Chinese medical diagnosis that calls for "that point;" they may need another point that is also good for "that symptom."

When you take a system that is not based on science (though science often CAN support that it works) and try to look at it through your scientific lens, you might not get to see it for what it is. When you boil that system down to try to find what makes it tick, you lose the magic that holds it together. You lose that which makes it work. Don't ignore the stuff that makes it work. Let's not forget that Qi and Yin and Yang and all of the theories of Chinese medicine ARE Chinese medicine. Let there be some scientific unknowns. Let there be magic!