Last week our CEO and Founder, Erin Hessel, was featured in a two-part interview in the Huffington Post on June 1st and June 2nd, 2010. Huffington Post correspondent, Jamie Frevele, got up-close with Erin discussing her thoughts on acupuncture, how it works, why she chose to study it, her specialization in women’s health and how it has evolved in Western culture.
“This is an ancient, 10,000-year old medicine that’s brand new to our culture. So it’s got a long way to go to get the validity it has in China,” says Erin in regards to the movement from East to West.
Erin goes on to state: “According to Chinese medicine, the needle is accessing an energetic frequency that the energy meridians in the body can respond to. We’re using that needle as a conduit to create change, flow and balance in the body. Now to us, Western-minded individuals who grew up in the United States, this makes absolutely no sense – and it doesn’t answer any of our questions! So to answer our questions, we’ve created studies and used different techniques to actually see what’s happening at the needle site and what’s happening in the brain when he needles are in. Although this is helpful, I think that is what’s so frustrating for the acceptance of acupuncture into Western medical society is because there isn’t a lot of consistency in the data. You know, just when we think “Oh this is exactly what it’s doing!” it’ll change into something else in another person. Because it’s so individualized.”
Two read the in-depth and personal interview in full, click here for part one and here for part two.