Page 72 - Total War on PTSD

protocol invented by Dr. Richard Niemtzow, MD, consisting of treating the patient by placing five needles at five specific points on each ear.
It didn't come to the West as a pain treatment, it was more of a treatment that came through Canada into the United States and it was first used relatively officially as a treatment for drug addiction...and primarily for opiate and heroin addictions as a replacement for Methadone treatment. It is kind of interesting because now we have more of an opioid crisis now and that's how Auricular Acupuncture came into the United States. It was more fully developed at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx where they had a big detoxification program. That is where the National Association of Detoxification Acupuncture (NADA) Program, which is what we use for our work, was developed. NADA, as an ear acupuncture treatment, was developed as a drug treatment initially and we refer to it as the NADA 5-Needle Protocol (or 5-NP).
The other piece is that when, in 1972, Richard Nixon was President and he did an astonishing thing. He actually went to China and that was a big deal in those days. He was accompanied by James Reston, who was the editor of the New York Times. During the trip James Reston ended up having to have an appendectomy which they were there because of an emergency case of appendicitis. Well, after the surgery he received body acupuncture as part of his treatment for rehabilitation and pain control instead of using drugs. Once they had returned from the trip and James Reston wrote about it, and it was kind of like a door opening, not only to China on a political level but also that this ancient therapy was being practiced widely in China and that the treatment had some validity. There was a whole bunch of history about acupuncture in China itself but in 1972 it kind of came on the scene through this drug treatment approach that was
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