Prof. Richard Harris (2)

About Prof. Richard Harris


University of Michigan,
Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center
Email: rharris@acupunctureresearch.org



Q5.

What do you want to show or elucidate as an acupuncture researcher in the future?


There’s so many questions that we don’t have answers for right now. Who’s likely to benefit from the therapy. Like when the acupuncturist sees a patient, we have no idea of knowing if that patient’s going to benefit from the treatment or not. So, it would be really nice if we could say, give them a questionnaire and say, because you scored this way on this questionnaire, we think you’re a good candidate for acupuncture. That would be very nice if we could do that. We can’t do that currently, so that would be something that’d be nice.


Another thing I think, that would be nice in the future is, if we had more integration of acupuncture with other modalities. Very frequently, we just compare acupuncture by itself versus sham acupuncture, or acupuncture by itself versus CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, or other interventions. But I think, we probably would have a synergistic effect if we started looking at how different treatments in combination with acupuncture sort of augment the treatment. Cause, even from the opioid study that we did, the data suggest that if we took pain patients and gave them acupuncture, in addition to an opiate drug, they might synergistically work to improve pain more, you know, to reduce pain more than just either of them in isolation. And maybe even more than the sum of the two, they might actually produce an interaction that’s even greater than the sum of the parts. So, things like that would be nice.


Another thing I think that would be nice would be, more probing into the theory of acupuncture and the theory of traditional Korean medicine and Chinese medicine. Getting more into the angle of what really the art does. Cause so far, a lot of us has just looked at the needle. And put the needle in different places. But there’s a lot of aspects to the treatment. There’s pulse diagnosis, there’s looking at the tongue, there’s other things in addition to the needle, there’s guasha, tuina, there’s all sorts of other things that acupuncturists do in conjunction with the needle. And we haven’t really explored that yet. So, I’d be interested in seeing that in the future, too.


Q6.

What do you think the most important issues of acupuncture research are?


One of the things that SAR tries to do is to sort of be a guidepost or light to shine the way for researchers to say “Aha! This is something we need to start probing more deeply and understand.” And, it’s been SAR’s mission to do that through its conferences, which has done historically since 1994. And we gather people around who are studying the same thing, acupuncture, and we share ideas. But SAR recently started taking on an additional step of actually creating documents that outline key issues in the field. We call these “White Papers.” And we had a white paper come out a few years ago which, you know, outlined sort of this paradox between the basic research findings of acupuncture and the clinical research findings and how there, there’s this gap. And the translation isn’t there yet to connect the results from those two angles.


We just recently have another white paper that’s looking at electroacupuncture versus manual acupuncture and how the field calls them both acupuncture, but yet, from the basic science perspective, they’re quite different. The question is in the clinical trials. Do they see differences between the two interventions and the field calls everything acupuncture but there’s a lot of things that are different between electrical and manual, just for example. So, we do these white papers.


We have a third white paper that was developed during our Beijing meeting earlier this year. And we had these think tank meetings where we discussed those. In the future, I would like to see SAR really fostering the development of young investigators and junior investigators, because that’s the key to sustain this train of thought into the future. It’s to have young talented bright investigators probe questions that the older investigators are so close-minded to really think about. It’s always nice to have young people come in and give us new energy. So, SAR might be able in some way to help foster that. We give awards at our conferences for junior investigators; we hope in the future to give travel awards for people who have really nice abstracts that have provocative findings but just can’t come because of the cost.


So, that’s one thing we would like to do and you know our main mission is really just to elucidate the field of acupuncture. We’re not a proponent of acupuncture, per se. We don’t want to say acupuncture is beneficial to other interventions necessarily. What we want to try to do is to have the truth about what’s the mechanism of acupuncture and where is it useful. So, we’re proponents of the research of acupuncture, whether it be positive or negative. We would like to stay in that zone of neither being a protagonist or an antagonist. But just being an organization that promotes the good quality science in exploration of the intervention.


Q7.

Do you have any plan to allow international researcheres to participate in the SAR program?


We have members on our board outside of the United States. So, historically, SAR has been developed by board members that have mostly been in the United States. But, now we have Hugh MacPherson from the U.K., Claudia Witt from Europe, and we’ve got Elisabet Stener-Victorin, we’ve had Lixing Lao, who’s now in Hong Kong. We do have people on our board that are international. We’re always looking to get more people on the board to be the next leaders. So, we are on the lookout for talented young people that want to be on the board and help. We’re very interested in getting an international focus. It may be that SAR might turn into something a kin to ISP, where there’s these international meetings that happen every now and then, every other year, maybe every three years. But there’ll be chapters in each country, so like SAR could be sort of the international organization. But there then might in the future, there might be a Korean chapter or a Chinese chapter or a Japanese chapter, etc. We don’t know if that’ll happen but that’s one possibility. If it might become too unwieldy to have people from all over the world, just logistically it’s hard, how can you have conference calls with people from all over the world, you know different time zones and it just gets to be really complicated logistically.


Q8

Would you give an advice for the young investigator to cheer them up?


I think the single most important thing for a young investigator is to really do what you are passionate about. I mean, I think it boils down to that. Because if you’re not passionate about what you do, then even if you succeed academically, you get grants, you get papers, if you don’t like what you’re doing, you’ve lost. So, and even if you’re passionate, if you’re passionate about what you do, it will open doors. The doors will open because you’re excited and passionate and people will see that, and then they’ll be gravitated toward you and it will give you opportunities that you wouldn’t expect that were serendipitous I guess. So, I guess the main thing is to, is to be as passionate, you know, to have to follow your dream. Because if you’re following your dream, it will happen. You know, it’ll happen.



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