NUHS grad to kickstart inpatient acupuncture treatment program at Elmhurst Hospital
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
As a medical doctor and recent NUHS acupuncture graduate,
Nooshig Salvador, MD, MSOM, HMDC, FACP, LAc, Diplomate OM, works at
one of many hospital systems that have begun offering integrative
medicine treatments for their patients.
Within the Palliative Care Program of Elmhurst-Edward Health, Dr.
Salvador has been using acupuncture predominately to treat the pain
of those with chronic illnesses.
"I consider it to be a pure blessing to have the skills to help
patients with symptoms like pain, dyspnea, headache, anxiety and
stress," said Dr. Salvador, who serves administrative and clinical
roles at both Elmhurst and Edward Hospitals as System Medical
Director for the Palliative Care Program. "When patients are
motivated enough to try these treatments, we have the ability to
reduce polypharmacy along with avoiding potential adverse effects
and interactions between multiple medications."
By the end of September, Dr. Salvador will start an inpatient
acupuncture program that will allow her to provide acupuncture and
other holistic services like nutritional advice to acutely ill
hospitalized patients at Elmhurst Hospital right at their bedside.
Dr. Salvador also plans to track how helpful acupuncture is in
reducing polypharmacy and hopefully even opioid requirements for
chronic pain.
Initially, she plans to work mainly with patients in the
Palliative Care Program, but as the program moves forward, she will
also be taking requests from other doctors at Elmhurst Hospital who
have patients interested in acupuncture. Depending on demand, the
program has the potential to expand.
"The hospital administrators have been very supportive," Dr.
Salvador said.
Dr. Salvador was once skeptical of acupuncture herself. But
after she received acupuncture treatment that cleared a viral upper
respiratory and sinus infection, she was amazed. "The more I
learned about acupuncture, the more I became interested in it as a
treatment modality," she said.
Once enrolled at NUHS, she was pleasantly surprised to see how
much the NUHS Health Center clinic ran
like her training as a medical student.
"I had excellent teachers who were experts in their specialty,"
she said.
During her time in the program, a fellow NUHS student helped
convince her to expand her studies in acupuncture by also getting
her Master's in Oriental Medicine, which includes the study of
Chinese herbal medicine.
Since graduating from NUHS in 2018, Dr. Salvador is also set to
graduate from
Dr. Andrew Weil's Integrative Medicine Fellowship Program,
which involves the study of traditional Chinese medicine and
Ayurveda among other treatment modalities, in September. With the
start of the inpatient acupuncture program at Elmhurst Hospital,
she's looking forward to utilizing some of the new modalities she's
learned.
"Using a multi-disciplinary integrative approach to help heal
our patients' ailments, it's not just the future but also the here
and now," she said.
