June 24, 2009 Greetings Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (AOM) Community: The American Association of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine asks you to reach out with this message to your patients, friends, family and colleagues. This letter is also available on our homepage at www.aaaomonline.org.
ASK THEM TO PASS HR 646, THE FEDERAL ACUPUNCTURE COVERAGE ACT Our lobbying team needs one more thing to persuade congress to support HR 646 – proof that patients care about this bill. The act of calling asserts persuasive proof and asserts our collective voice. Crisscrossing the country, we’re asking you to JAM THE PHONE LINES into your representatives’ offices. Ask them to co-sponsor HR 646, encourage a companion bill in the Senate, and request the Obama administration fold HR 646 into our president’s healthcare reform package. When China faced a healthcare crisis in 1949, with too many people to treat, too little money, and too few doctors to provide care, they turned to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), now commonly referred to as acupuncture and Oriental medicine (AOM). The U.S. presently faces a similar crisis. We have unmet health care needs, virtually no preventative care, and spiraling costs we cannot support. AOM has been providing an uninterrupted system of prevention and wellness world-wide for over 5,000 years. AOM makes primary health care more affordable because it provides successful treatments for chronic and acute conditionsat a fraction of the cost of Western medicine. It differs from Western medicine by emphasizing patient education and preventive care and by teaching patients how to take personal responsibility for their health, along with treatment. Allowing patients to decide what forms of healthcare services they choose in a free and open marketplace has been a long-standing principle in American economic history. Currently, Americans are forced to decide among the most expensive health care services in the world. Most insurance plans currently do not give the option to choose one of the safest, most effective, and inexpensive forms of medical care—acupuncture and Oriental medicine (AOM) (this includes acupuncture, Asian herbal medicine, medical massage, diet modifications, and breathing and movement therapies). When American medical consumers are given an opportunity to choose a less expensive, safer healthcare in the form of AOM, everybody wins. A bill pending in the House of Representatives, HR 646, redresses this inequity. Place your support behind HR 646 by writing your Congressperson at http://www.aaaomonline.org/ EDUCATE YOURSELF: Before calling, take a few minutes to learn about the bill.
Thank you for the growing consumer reports we’ve seen in the past few weeks as our AOM in U.S. Healthcare/ HR 646 Acupuncture in Medicare campaigns have taken hold. Expanding our advocacy will create a rippling impact, assuring 54,000,000 Americans will be given the right to access – the right to choose AOM as a medical modality in their lives! Please call your Congresspersons on Tuesday, July 7th, or Tuesday, July 21st, and ask them to support HR 646 and AOM in healthcare reform.
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Monday, July 6, 2009
health care reform
I interupt the reularly scheduled article on environmental health=human health to bring you this information, in case you are inclined to let your voice be heard for something I care deeply about....
Thank you and good day
Michele Salinas
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
I thought I would start out entering my new venture of blogging to talk about how ecological health = human health. Why take on such a huge task? Because I can put it off no longer.
Yesterday I was scootering out with my 150cc vehicle when I noticed yet again what can only be noticed if you walk, bicycle or scooter/cycle for transportation. The air and atmosphere was warm but pleasant, the breeze comfortable--even in stopped positions--in the country, in the shade, under the big trees. As I took a break under a stand of 8 trees, I enjoyed the air flow provided by the thousands of leaves, as well as the soothing rustling sound they made. Birds sang their sweet entoxicating melody. It was 92 in the sun, higher in the parking lot a few feet away. But where I was it was cool and sort of magical, certainly mesmerizing.
Do we as a society take note of these things?
In contrast, coming into town, especially waiting at the red lights, it felt more like 100 degrees. I was feeling downright irritable, I see so many violent animal roadkill, deer, cats, dogs, squirrel, groundhog, possum. Trash where my eyes gaze, oil stains blighting parking lots, noise and more violence as I navigate my way through automobiles, those potential weapons of mass destruction. What opium was to China in some ways makes gasoline to Americans. A scant tree here or there to break the sickly monopoly of commercialization.
People will not get the sensual difference between the beauty of the former and the ugliness of the latter as long as they remain isolated in their air conditioned car and climate controlled home. There is alot of research about how historically civilizations fell and species went extinct in relation to climate and ecosystem destruction. The New Yorker discusses this in a recent article on the endangerment of frogs and bats in a recent edition.
We will not understand what a noisy and traumatic stressors we put forth in the world in the form of decibels rocketing from our machines. Unless we open our windows, both physical and psychological.
Cycles repeat themselves. The rise and fall of the oceans, the dinosaurs, the mammoths, wilderness, and now, I feel, humankind.
I will explore the implications of individual health and Oriental Medicine in my next installment.
In the pursuit of truth, love, purity, and beauty in the world of forms,
Michele Salinas, LAc, Dipl. CH, RN-BSN, MSOM
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