American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia

Hi Ray,

Glad to hear you are having a good time and finding it educational.

Are the REI's coming by the CAM special interest groups/talks. What has the reaction been about acupuncture ans herbs.

Lorne
www.acubalance.ca
www.prodseminars.com

We had the second of our 3-required annual Special Interest Group meetings  here are ASRM that will allow us to become an affiliated special interest group of ASRM. The name of our special interest group is the Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Special Interest Group (SIG). We will have our 3rd meeting at ASRM in Denver next year, and this will allow us to go from probational status, to full status with ASRM as a SIG. 

Once you become a SIG with ASRM, it allows you to sponsor actual symposia and Post Grad courses at the annual ASRM meeting. Obviously this opens up a great many doors for presentation of research, case studies, etc. We look forward to this growing participation with ASRM.

At this year's ASRM CAM-SIG meeting there were a number of RE's in attendance, as well as Alice Domar, Ph.D. who came to offer her input and support for more evidence-based CAM practices. 

Today, at one of the Round-Table lunches, I had the pleasure of sitting with Dr. Ernest Hung, who was the lead author/researcher on the recently-published Placebo-Controlled Acupuncture/IVF trial in Human Reproduction (YN Hung, ESS Wing, YY Wong, ELL Yee,, SBB Yeung, CH Pak (2009). "A randomized double blind comparison of real and placebo acupuncture in IVF Treatment". Human Reproduction. Vol. 24, No.2, pp. 341-348).

Also at that Round Table were REI's from Boston and Houston, as well as Embryologists and my good friend and colleague Dr. Sadhna Singh, L. Ac. (FABORM).  We all talked at length about the strengths and weakness of Placebo Acupuncture Needles and Sham Acupuncture as effective controls for Acupuncture Research, and we discussed the opportunity for collaboration on Acupuncture Research Trials for both male and female infertility with Dr. Hung's Group in Hong Kong.

Dr. Hung is the head of the REI Department in his Hospital, and is a board-certified REI. Also, Several of the others participating in the Round Table were very interested in participating in further Acupuncture research. 

This evening I had the pleasure of dining with Dr. Daoshing Ni (Author of the Tao of Fertility), Dr. Sadhna Singh, Dr. Mark Schwarz, L. Ac. (practitioner here in Atlanta who is sitting for ABORM Certification next year in Albuquerque), and Charles Jenkins, who is the director of operations for Reprosource ( a major reproductive medicine lab testing service that offers testing on ovarian reserve and sperm DNA-Fragmentation Indexing). You can listen to Ben Leader, M.D. (the owner and chief medical officer of Reprosource) do a webinar on TCM-TV through Chinese Medicine Tools.

Ben Leader, and Charles and I also met today to finalize further discuss the establishment of a Practice Based Data Collection Network that will utilize  standardized data collection forms (which we will encourage all ABORM Fellows and Yo San DAOM Candidates to complete) to allow us as practitioners to begin to develop a massive online database which can be searched for outcomes measures to develop ideas for prospective, randomized, controlled trials. We are very pleased to have the backing of Repro-Source for this very exciting Practice-Based-Data-Collection-Network. 

All-in-all it has been a very exciting week of learning, networking, catching up with new and old friends and colleagues, and laying the seeds for the future of collaboration with TCM and Western Reproductive Medicine. 

Ray Rubio, DAOM, L. Ac. (FABORM)

President ABORM

Chair: Reproductive Medicine Department/Yo San DAOM

www.westlakecomplementarymedicine.com

Hi ray,

It would be great to do a TV interview (www.tcmtv.net) with you about your ASRM week. Give you a chance to elaborate on all the things you have written about. I will follow up with you in a few days to see fi this interst you. In the meantime, maybe those reading this post can et us know if there is really a demand for it. Ray is one busy practitioner and I am sure h would do it if he knew there was a demand for it. Place a vote here by adding a comment "Please interview Ray". If there is enough interest we will do our best to make it happen. If not Ray has his plate full with the ABORM and Doctorate program at Yp San not to mention his private practice and family.

Lorne
www.acubalance.ca
www.prodseminars.com