Bill Reddy, LAc, Dipl. Ac.
Author’s Note: I recently spoke with Matthew Bauer, who has been an acupuncturist since 1986 and is president of the Acupuncture Now Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating people about the benefits of acupuncture, and author of the book Acupuncture Now: How to Treat Your Pain. Making a profit from acupuncture: practical advice for setting up a successful private practice.
BR: The number of people with diabetes is projected to reach 39.7 million in the United States by 2030.1 This highlights the future challenge of peripheral neuropathy (PN), and this figure does not include chemotherapy-induced and idiopathic peripheral neuropathy.
MB: Absolutely. The diabetes epidemic has also created a PN epidemic, with 30% of diabetic patients and 50% of diabetic patients over 65 years of age developing PN. Add to that chemotherapy and HIV/AIDS-induced PN, and the millions of people with unexplained or idiopathic PN, and the numbers become staggering. All of this is referred to as glove-and-stocking PN, as it primarily causes pain and numbness in the legs and hands.
And is there no cure? No. There are some medications that can relieve the pain of PN to some extent, but there are no medications that can reverse the nerve damage associated with PN, which not only causes pain but also many other symptoms, including numbness, which is a major factor in complications such as foot pain, especially in diabetic patients.
Tell us about your experience treating PN. I have been treating PN since the 1980s with good results. I am an intuitive acupuncturist who finds acupuncture points by feel, and I found the same points in different PN patients. I eventually developed a five-point prescription for treating PN in the foot and a three-point prescription for treating PN in the hand, with a success rate of over 80 percent. When I decided to put together an online course to teach my protocol, I reviewed the research on acupuncture for PN and made a surprising discovery. That’s when the idea for the Acupuncture Now Foundation (ANF) was born: to launch a campaign to raise awareness that acupuncture is the best treatment for PN.
Tell us about your campaign. This campaign is based on the fact that acupuncture can stimulate the regeneration of damaged nerves, something that traditional treatments cannot achieve. Multiple studies dating back over a decade have demonstrated that acupuncture improves nerve conduction based on NCS and EMG testing. I have consistently seen patients who could not feel the needles begin to feel them as their treatment plan progressed, but I had no idea this was verified by research. This is a big deal.
What are the obstacles in the process and what are the next logical steps? Part of the challenge is getting the research to actually be noticed by the public, other health care providers, and health care policy makers. Part of our plan to achieve this is to submit a summary of our research to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for consideration in covering acupuncture for peripheral neuropathy under Medicare. The formal process is called a National Coverage Determination.
We spent months putting together and sorting the survey. By the time this interview is published, ANF will have submitted its data to CMS. They will evaluate the survey that we submitted and will do their own review. This entire process will become part of the public record, and it will include two 30-day windows. [during which] Others can submit information to CMS, and we will then use this evidence in our outreach campaign to educate everyone on why acupuncture should be considered the standard of care for this very widespread condition.
How can acupuncturists learn your evidence-based protocol? Take the 4-hour online course “Five Point Nerve Regeneration Peripheral Neuropathy Protocol”. This course is offered through Net of Knowledge and delivery partners such as Lhasa OMS in the US and has a great system for students to give feedback and ask questions to the instructor. The feedback so far has been very positive, with people saying they have been practicing the protocol from day one and seeing good results. There are also many videos of my actual patients, showing how their hyposensitive nerves start to awaken with each treatment. I also review the points used in successful studies and show that every point in my protocol was found in those studies.
Is there anything else you want us to know about this campaign? Yes. Everyone who takes the course can opt-in to the database we are developing in collaboration with the Net of Knowledge. As the public and health care professionals who treat PN learn through our outreach efforts that acupuncture can help repair damaged nerves, they will seek out acupuncturists who are properly trained to administer this treatment. We can refer them to this database and connect them to acupuncturists who are trained in the evidence-based treatments found in successful studies.
To be as successful as possible, we also need buy-in from the entire acupuncture community, and we are reaching out to acupuncture associations and leaders around the world to find partners who will help make this happen.
Do you have a budget for the outreach campaign you plan to run? ANF has received a grant from Google to access up to $10,000 per month in pay-per-click advertising with Google, and will use a majority of the funds raised from the sale of this course, combined with Google Ads funding, to cover the costs of our outreach campaign. The more courses we take, the more funds we have for outreach efforts, and the more people who can access our database to find acupuncturists trained in these evidence-based protocols. Of course, as a registered US charity, we welcome donations to help fund this campaign.
For more information about the course and the campaign, visit the ANF website at www.acunow.org and click on the pn-campaign tab.
I wish you success in your efforts and hope that in the future Medicare will cover acupuncture for peripheral neuropathy.
reference
- Lin J, Thompson TJ, Cheng YJ, et al. “Projecting the future burden of diabetes in the United States through 2060.” Popul Health Index,2018;16:9.
