TCM and Research
Photo by Snapjlr.
This weekend, I attended the 2009 Symposiun for Portland Area Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (SPARC). SPARC is a yearly event where all Complementary and Alternative medicine come together to listen to new research presentations, view posters, and discuss research in the field of alternative medicine. The Helfgott Research Institute is the organizer of this event – you can check out their blog here.
Dr. Josephine Briggs, the director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) gave a great presentation on how alternative medicine is changing in the west, and how it is sought out now compared to several years ago. For example, in a 2007 survey, the top three reasons patients seek acupuncture was for back pain, neck pain, and joint pain. Compare this to a 2002 survey where the common cold was the reason (now it’s down around #7!). It’s good to see that people are realizing the all-encompassing healing that is Traditional Chinese Medicine, and I can’t wait to see what comes up in a future survey.
For a list of more research articles, check out Barbican Acupuncture’s research page, or Chinese Medicine News.
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Comments
Amy,
May I ask how you feel about research?
I’m a bit torn, I must admit:
I realise that they are important, but I feel they are mainly important so we will have a better communication with Western doctors.
Along with that, I feel that the minute you take something that is not scientific and force scientific rules upon it, you make a mistake. While it might work ok with herbs, I fear it’s not doing justice to acupuncture.
While TCM might “get away with it” easily, I feel that Stems and Branches and 5 elements are losing even before you started talking in the research.
And I’m not even going to to start talking abot pulse, which will never stand to be looked at in a scientific way…
So what do you think?
Thanks,
Yael
I feel very similar – I worked in the research department at OCOM for 2 years, and accessed hundreds of studies with acupuncture. Many LAc’s agree that you can’t really treat acupuncture studies the same as western medicine studies, but there don’t seem to be alternatives at this point. I think that research in our field is slowly evolving, and hopefully one of these days we will have a solution that will satisfy both the Western medical as well as the “alternative medicine” journals.
Here is free on line seminar (about 30 minutes) geared for practitioners. It is on the benefits and pitfalls relating to acupuncture research. It is very informative and provides lots of insight on how to read studies on acupuncture. Plus it goes through many myths and misconceptions when using placebo and sham acupuncture. The public would enjoy it as well but it was created as an on line CEU course for acupuncturist. Brandon reviews research on on IVF and acupuncture for his examples.
Enjoy, compliments of Prodseminars.com
http://www.prodseminars.net/courses/courses/horn-full/player.html?pop=TRUE
Hi Amy,
Cool that you write about the research that has been done in the field of acupuncture. In holland there is a website called http://www.iocob.nl. They also have an english section. I can recommend them to you.
But actually I am writing to ask you for your opinion on acupuncture and swine flu. My spam-box is allready full with special medicins from all over the world that can cure it…