Dear Friends: I hope this note finds you, your family and all of your loved ones safe, well, thriving and even happy. It has been a stressful period. As we move toward reopening our society, the stresses don’t diminish, they only change shape. Almost everyone on this mailing list knows that the Mid-Hudson Valley Region of Governor Cuomo’s New York PAUSE has reached Phase One. This means that construction, agriculture, manufacturing and other large-scale industries can begin to reopen. I’ll open again when we reach Phase Two. Barring reverses, this should be within a week or two. The outer sha ..read more

Dear Friends: Yesterday I made the decision to temporarily close my doors during the current health crisis. I will re-evaluate on an ongoing basis. The important message right now is to limit social contact to prevent the rapid spread of infection. The experience of other countries and US localities tells us that many of us are already carrying the virus. Our hospitals and health facilities will quickly become overwhelmed if we don’t slow the transmission of illness. Accurate information is critical to all of us. These are good places to start: Governor Cuomo’s office https://coronavirus.heal ..read more

I am happy to announce a series of four, low-cost, Battlefield Acupuncture clinics at my Cherry Hill Plaza office in New Paltz. The clinics will take place on Tuesday, May 21; Thursday, May 23; Tuesday, May 28, and Tuesday, June 4. The cost is $55. Treatment is by appointment only. Battlefield Acupuncture is a protocol for rapid pain relief developed for the U.S. Armed Forces by Air For ce Col. Richard Niemstow, MD. It entails the placement of tiny needles on and around the external ear. It is being disseminated widely throughout the military for use in combat situations, during the transport ..read more

Does acupuncture work? Did the acupuncture I provided to an individual person in an individual case achieve the results we both strove for? Regarding the first question: A couple of years into my career, I decided that acupuncture does work, based on my personal experience as a provider, as contrasted with the relentless positivity of acupuncture school, where we were told all the time that it worked. (If it didn’t, what were we doing there?) Whether acupuncture has worked beneficially for an individual person in my care is a question I ask myself all the time. (It’s closely connected with th ..read more

In my previous post, I wrote about the New York Times interview with Andrew Weil concerning his new book, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better – and When to let Your Body Heal on Its Own. I’ve now read the book, and I can say that it’s a smart, comprehensive approach to the topic in the title, one that offers many tips for managing and minimizing the use of medication. Too many Americans take too many medications. In a book organized around classes of drugs – statins, antihistamines, steroids, NSAIDs, psychiatric medication both for adults and for childr ..read more

In the June 22, 2017 New York Times, reporter Steven Petrow published a brief interview with Andrew Weil in connection with Weil’s new book, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs Are Necessary, When AlternativesAre Better – and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own.” (Here’s the link: https://nyti.ms/2sTxgzc.) It caught my attention as an acupuncturist because acupuncture is a non-pharmacologic (i.e., an alternative to medication-centered treatment) soft-tissue therapy. The lesions created by inserting acupuncture needles stimulate the body’s healing mechanisms to address pain and dysfunction and t ..read more

May I direct your attention to the excellent coverage (with one critical exception) of treatments for back pain in the current issue of Consumer Reports? It seems to be available to non-subscribers at http://www.consumerreports.org/back-pain/guide-to-treating-back-pain/. (I am a subscriber but I can get to it without logging in.) It’s comprehensive, and it’s a great follow-up to my blog of February 17, 2007, “American College of Physicians Endorses Acupuncture as Noninvasive Treatment for Low Back Pain” at https://www.weinsteinacu.com/single-post/2017/02/17/American-College-of-Physicians-Endo ..read more

Every now and then, a patient asks me if I treat myself. I do. As I write this, I’m sitting on a kitchen chair with needles in my gluteus medius muscles, which, according to Travell & Simons’s The Trigger Point Manual, are the adductors of the thighs related to “pain when walking, when lying on the back or on the affected side, and when sitting slouched in a chair.” As noted in my previous post, I almost always treat these muscles when someone complains of lower back pain. I don’t have lower back pain or pain when walking but I do slouch in my chair more than I want to, and I’ve been waki ..read more

Whether it was intended as a Valentine’s Day gift to the acupuncture profession or not, on February 14 the American College of Physicians (ACP), issued new clinical guideline recommending acupuncture among other noninvasive and nonpharmacologic therapies for acute, subacute and chronic low back pain. “Nonpharmacologic” describes a treatment that does not entail taking drugs. With this clinical guideline, acupuncture takes another step toward the mainstream of medical care. At its website (www.acponline.org), the ACP writes that it “is a national organization of internists, the largest medical ..read more

One of my readers has asked me to talk about how I treat hip pain. Hip pain is a big deal. Pain in general is a big deal. It’s worth talking about this because acupuncture should be considered a mainstream treatment of choice in addressing pain. It’s not really alternative, although it’s often described that way (it hasn’t been for several thousand years) and it’s non-pharmacologic. Why is non-pharmacologic important? Because it’s useful to avoid medication when possible and when cost-effective. In general, it’s cost-effective to take an aspirin or ibuprofen for an acute sore shoulder when co ..read more