Unified Practice

As acupuncturists, it’s fun to see new research that comes out and supports our traditional view of health. In June, a new study was released from Columbia University that shows a correlation between birth month and risk of certain diseases. For us practitioners of East Asian medicine, this makes total sense. Your health and wellness (or your tendency towards disease) is partially determined by your constitution (zhī běn之本)– which is influenced by your parents, their health at your conception, when you were conceived, and when you were born. While we can talk a lot about Columbia’s new research and the implications, what we want to focus on is how the research was done – the mining of electronic data from 1.7 million patients.

Western EHRs and Acupuncture EHRs allow for this kind of research. The ability to scour millions of electronic health records and find details hidden in billions of bits of data allows for patterns and correlations like this to be discovered. An entire academic field is popping up to do just this kind of work and it is called Medical informatics. Using complex software and searching algorithms, professionals in this field are able to scour data and find patterns and correlations that would have been otherwise impossible to detect.

It is studies like this one from Columbia that gets us so excited about Acupuncture EHRs being used by the Traditional Chinese medical community – what other amazing discoveries can be made with our data that will confirm TCM principles? What if we were able to connect particular pulse patterns to disease events by looking at thousands of patient encounters? How about searching for seven emotions etiology in relation to other disease states? We could search for incidences of anxiety/ fear related conditions and correlate them to diseases we would expect to be associated with the Kidneys and Spleen.

In previous blog posts, we have talked about the importance of Acupuncture EHRs in increasing the evidence base. If data can show the effectiveness of acupuncture treatments for specific injuries or the benefit of herbal medicine to specific conditions, that data is helping to legitimize our medical practice. Increasing our evidence base does not need to be dependent on randomized controlled trials or the research conducted by non-acupuncturists. EHRs give acupuncturists a tool that allows for the safe and secure collection of data – allowing us to seek and find evidence for the medicine. Columbia’s study is just a window into the possibilities of what patient’s data can be used for. It is for this reason that we encourage all acupuncturists to integrate an acupuncture practice management software into their practice and to start thinking about research ideas that could be used to shed light on ancient understandings of our medicine!

What kind of studies would you want to see performed with access to billions of pieces of data? What Chinese medical concepts do you think we could explore using all of the available medical data that EHRs allow for?

Guest blog post by Thomas Meade.