Jessica and I started the day with Dr. Chen, Chien-An (Dr. 陳建安 ) of the TCM department to observe his acupuncture clinic for about an hour before we saw Dr. Chen, Chun-I (Dr.陳駿逸)from oncology walk in borrow some acupuncture needles from Dr. Chen, Chien-An to teach our other classmates that are rotating with him about acupuncture and its role in cancer treatment. Dr. Chen, Chien-An saw that it was a great opportunity for Jessica and I to learn more about acupuncture and told us to follow Dr. Chen, Chun-I to learn from him for the rest of the morning. We ended up meeting up with Amanda, Bor-Han and Sandy, and was given a very interesting power point presentation about acupuncture. I found it interesting that many of the concepts used in acupuncture could be found in our lectures from the OMM department, such as those regarding nociception. It appears that there is the theory that acupuncture works as a gate control to modulate pain. In other words you feel the sensation of the needle upstream which interrupts the pain signal downstream. Dr. Chen, Chun-I is very enthusiastic about evidence based medicine and believes that more research should be done on TCM. For his presentation he used most of the research that were done from peer reviewed journals that were done in English and noted that there was much more research that has been done in Asia but he felt that some of the publications were reviewed under the same rigor. The most exciting part of the morning was that we all given the opportunity to practice acupuncture on each other on points located in the upper and lower extremities, it almost felt like a mini-lab much like those that we are accustomed to in the OMM department at Touro.
In the afternoon Jessica and I went down to Dr. Ho’s clinic. At one point he jokingly told a patient that he doesn’t do more Tui Na because he patients have a hard time following his aftercare directions, such as not to cross their legs and not to place their feet on foot rests. Interestingly enough one my nursing friends sent me an article about leg crossing inducing lumbar scoliosis from a Taiwanese newspaper a few months ago and asked me to if it was possible to translate it to English. In any case here is the original Chinese version, I have not had time to translate it to English yet. By the way if anyone is interested in the project let me know.
After the first hour with Dr. Ho, we ended up getting excused to follow Dr. Chen, Chun-I again and had a very interesting presentation about acupuncture use as an adjuvant therapy in oncology. It appears that acupuncture is great at reducing some of the adverse effects of radiation and chemotherapy such as nausea and helps with overall recovery. I am excited that he allowed us to keep the power points that he presented and told us that it would be okay to present the material to the rest of the school if wanted at some point.
Overall the experience in the TCM department was a very exciting an interesting experience for me. I had some difficulty due to language barriers but I feel I was still able to get a lot out of my experience there and feel honored to have had such a great opportunity to learn from many amazing preceptors I have encountered so far.
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