Acupuncture is being used more and more

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He was born in Taiwan and moved to Germany for junior and high school as his father was a cardiovascular surgeon and served on the faculty of Frankfurt Medical School. Dr. Chen then received his college/medical school education/residency/fellowship in the United States. After Stanford medical school, he served on the faculty to teach medical students and train doctors at Stanford. He left his academic career, for private practice 20 years ago when he opened an office in San Mateo.

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Back problems are among patients’ most frequent complaints to their doctors. In the United States, more than 80% of all adults experience persistent or chronic back pain, and as a result are limited in certain everyday activities. Back pain is the sixth most costly condition in the United States. Health care costs and indirect costs due to back pain are over $12 billion per year. In 1996, the FDA gave acupuncture its first U.S. seal of approval, when it classified acupuncture needles as medical devices.

Acupuncture first caught on in the United States because of a story in The New York Times by a reporter who wrote about how acupuncture healed his pain from failed back surgery by using tiny needles.

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If you are feeling pessimistic about the future, you are not alone. So many signals that we, or at least some of us, are determined to destroy the planet and our democracy and our education system. Competence is being attacked by both the right and the left. Without respect for competence, our way of life and our political system cannot function. “In the past month, the delta variant has driven up the number of new COVID cases by tens of thousands, thrown America’s pandemic response back into chaos and jeopardized the nation’s fragile economic recovery. In light of this, you might think that all of us — Republicans and Democrats alike — could at least agree on one thing: A well-functioning democratic society requires, at a bare minimum, public officials competent enough to tackle the numerous challenges we face. Today, however, the very idea of competence is being called into question. Claims of competence and associated concepts — expertise, authority, knowledge and experience among them — are increasingly viewed on both sides of the political spectrum as covert attempts to advance self-interested political agendas.” — From a recent op-ed in The New York Times.

On the right, the attack on competence is part out of deep-rooted populist and nationalist mistrust of “elites,” “globalists” and “cosmopolitans,” who are cynically selling out white and rural Americans by taking jobs away from hard-working Americans by destroying the fossil fuel industry. On the left, some progressives are equally suspicious of claims of competence, knowledge and expertise, as thinly disguised efforts to maintain unjust existing power structures (“privilege”) that devalue or exclude people of color, women, immigrants and the poor. Don’t standardized tests such as the SAT operate to keep disadvantaged children out of elite colleges?

Sue Lempert is the former mayor of San Mateo. Her column runs every Monday. She can be reached at sue@smdailyjournal.com.