Page 59 - Total War on PTSD

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 being developed by some creative practitioners in the South Bronx; but also due to Nixon and James Reston coming back from China.
The person who really worked with this at Lincoln Hospital was Dr. Michael Smith. He was an MD, and he worked with other practitioners in the drug rehabilitation unit of Lincoln Hospital. It was really a team approach of numerous practitioners who kind of distilled the NADA 5-NP into what we use today. This protocol has been used for 30 years now. Again, it was initially used as a drug rehabilitation treatment, then as a pain treatment, and more recently (maybe the last 15 years or so) as a trauma treatment. The reason acupuncture in general is useful for PTSD as well for pain and drug addiction is that it works with the brain's chemistry...it works to regulate the system...and when I say regulate, I mean that very physiologically. This is because, in trauma, the nervous system and the whole body is dis-regulated. And so you can't process the experience of trauma when you're in a dis-regulated state. Literally, you can't process something if the
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