Acupuncture Services of Central NY

After reading “Battlefield Acupuncture for the Clinical Practitioner” by Dr. John Amaro, I just had to learn more about this technique. A little research led me to this great article by Dr. Richard Niemtzow himself. Dr. Niemtzow developed this new auricular therapy protocol in 2001. His article gives very specific step by step instructions, diagrams and photos for needle placement to achieve almost immediate pain relief.

I decided to try the technique on several of my patients who had been suffering from chronic pain. I have one patient in particular that I have been seeing for several months for severe back pain. Having been in an auto accident ten years previously, and having fractured several vertebrae, he had been making progress with some of my other acupuncture protocols for back pain. When I first met him his pain level was 8 on a scale of 10 most of the time. With weekly treatments, we were able to give him several days of complete pain relief after the treatment and when the pain returned, it rarely exceeded a 5 on a scale of 10. He had tried other therapies over the years with little relief and was very happy with this improvement. I, on the other hand, am always looking for new ways to relieve pain.

With Dr. Niemtzow's instructions in front of me, I inserted an ASP gold needle into the cingulate gyrus point on his left ear and told him to walk up and down the hallway for a few minutes. When he returned, I asked if he noticed a change in his pain level. With disappointment showing on his face, he said “no, not really”. As the instructions stated, I put a needle in the same point on the other ear. He stood to start down the hallway again and turned to me with a big smile on his face. “That's the ear! This is amazing!” he said. When he returned from his hallway stroll, his pain had decreased 60%. I inserted the other four points in that dominant ear and let him rest on the table for a half hour.

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Posted by Joyce Marley at 02:17 PM | Battlefield Acupuncture: A New Pain Therapy

Recently, I have received several requests for information on battlefield acupuncture, a term first used in 2001 by my friend and colleague Col. Richard Niemtzow, MD, PhD, who serves as a consultant for complementary and alternative medicine to the Surgeon General of the Air Force. I have served with him on the board of Directors of the Auriculotherapy Certification Institute.

It was recently announced that the U.S. Air Force will begin training physicians being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in a specific type of treatment. The treatment uses small needles in the skin of the ear to block pain in as few as five minutes and can last for several days or longer. The procedure was initially introduced in 2008 at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC), where it was applied to wounded service members and local patients for pain relief, with significant results. The hospital, located near Ramstein Air Base in Germany, is the largest and most modern U.S. military medical facility outside the United States.

One of the pain specialists at LRMC personally experienced a 25 percent increased range of motion and a 50 percent reduction in pain for chronic shoulder and upper back pain he had endured for several years. As a result of his outstanding success, this pain specialist recruited his most challenging patients, for whom traditional pain treatment had offered limited relief. Within minutes of the needles being inserted, many said their pain was reduced by up to 75 percent. A 25 percent reduction would be considered a success with traditional pain medications.

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Posted by Joyce Marley at 08:47 PM | Battlefield Acupuncture for the Clinical Practitioner By John Amaro, L.Ac, DC

When I was a first year student in my TCM training, in my enthusiasm and eagerness to apply what I was learning to my future patients, I would approach my professors and say, for example, “can Chinese medicine treat fibromyalgia?” Or, “can Chinese medicine treat multiple sclerosis?” Every time, I would get the same response - “what are the signs and symptoms?”

We are talking about a system of medicine that has been around for thousands of years. There really is no frame of reference in Chinese medicine to the Western disease labels that have evolved in modern times. Chinese medicine will always look at everything going on in the body and determine an imbalance of yin and yang, Qi and Blood. In fact, there is a very famous saying in Chinese medicine - “one disease, many treatments...many diseases, one treatment.”

What I love about “The Treatment of Modern Western Medical Diseases with Chinese Medicine”, co-authored by Bob Flaws and Philippe Sionneau, is the detailed analysis of 72 different Western medicine labels and all the patterns of imbalance that are usually associated with them in Chinese medicine. For each of the diseases there is information on the Western etiology, treatment and prognosis. And then a detailed analysis of the disease mechanisms from a Chinese medicine aspect. Acupuncture and herbal treatments are suggested based on pattern discrimination. Summary remarks address the prognosis from a Chinese medicine point of view.

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Posted by Joyce Marley at 05:23 AM | What Does Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine Treat?