Chronic pain is the No. 1 cause of American adults seeking integrated care in this country. In 2016, an estimated 20.4 percent of U.S. adults (50 million) had chronic pain and 8 percent of U.S. adults (19.6 million) had high-impact chronic pain, with higher prevalence associated with advancing age. The Veterans Health Administration is taking a new approach to this not so new problem: a holistic view including both physical and emotional well-being. The Whole Health initiative focuses not on what is the matter with the patient, but rather what matters to the patient.

A VA chiropractic residency exposes participants to a wide range of treatments. In this blog post, resident Vivian Ly, DC, of the Connecticut VA discusses "battlefield acupuncture" or BFA. Air Force Colonel Richard Niemtzow introduced the BFA protocol in 2001 as a subset of auricular acupuncture. In 2013, $5.4 million was awarded to the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) to teach BFA to healthcare providers in both the military and department of Veterans Affairs and assess it. Dr. Ly notes that BFA is easily learned and has been proposed to treat a variety of conditions that cause pain in active military members and veterans.

ACA’s annual meeting, the National Chiropractic Leadership Conference, brings you cutting-edge, evidence-based education sessions featuring some of the chiropractic profession’s most respected thought leaders and content experts. Many sessions also offer continuing education credits. Here we pose questions to one of the presenters: Jeffrey Sklar, DC, director of chiropractic services, Eastern region, Cancer Treatment Centers of America. His presentation is “Chiropractic, Integrative Oncology and Patient Centered Care.”

ACA’s annual meeting, the National Chiropractic Leadership Conference, brings you cutting-edge, evidence-based education sessions featuring some of the chiropractic profession’s most respected thought leaders and content experts. Many sessions also offer continuing education credits. Here we pose questions to one of the presenters: Alan K. Sokoloff, DC—known to his patients as “Dr. Sok”—who is team chiropractor for the two-time Super Bowl-champion Baltimore Ravens.

The inclusion of chiropractic practitioners into various collaborative health systems has increased over the past decade. The addition of chiropractic within these multi-disciplinary settings has been embraced by many as a way to manage spinal conditions, such as back and neck pain, using noninvasive therapies. However, taking a patient-centered approach to such integration involving various health care practitioners leads to new questions and challenges and requires novel research to optimize patient outcomes in these settings.