Talk to Doctors about Acupuncture

A Guide for Talking to Doctors about Acupuncture and Brain Chemistry

By Christian Nix and Paul Raford, MD, MPH

Before I begin any discussion of how to talk about the effects of acupuncture on brain chemistry, nervous and endocrine function, it is essential to understand just what physicians most need help with. Who are the patients that most frustrate physicians and conventional medicine?

This is a key step that so many otherwise competent acupuncturists skip when presented with an opportunity to reach out to the mainstream. If you know what is important to physicians, what interests them, what matters to them, if you understand what they need help with as well as the problems to which they are seeking solutions, then you can craft a very targeted and well thought out presentation. Better still, if you learn to craft your communication in language they understand and respect, you become an unstoppable proposition.

Why? Simple: because the size of the problem and your opportunity to help out is so enormous. Because acupuncture is inherently suited to help modern medicine in treating and managing the exact patients that so confound the conventional system, the key to all of this is your ability to communicate effectively.

This article will both identify the key frustrations of conventional medical professionals within the 21st century patient population, and will also provide legitimate explanations in biomedical terms for the mechanisms by which acupuncture gets its effects – complete with some of the essential phraseology useful to achieve serious rapport with and respect from physicians. A review of the literature and even modest and low-level understanding of the 21st century patient population makes clear that certain conditions are especially confounding to modern, conventional medicine.

In the broadest terms, the most difficult to treat patients are generally suffering from four specific co-morbidities that far, far outweigh all other diseases both in terms of the numbers of patients who present, and in regard to how difficult they can be to treat successfully with conventional modern medicine.

The literature overwhelmingly reveals that pain, stress, anxiety and depression are by far the most costly complaints physicians are forced to treat in patients. Technically, stress is not a disease and thus not to be found in the DSM (although the ICD classifications DO categorize "stress" as a diagnosable condition). However – as you will soon learn – interruption of the stress response is one thing acupuncture does best.

Acupuncture is already understood as and believed by the public to be primarily a pain therapy so this is no hard-sell to physicians or patients or anyone else for that matter. To address the other top disease conditions, we must focus on what are perhaps the two most difficult co-morbidities in all of medicine: anxiety and depression.

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