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ASM Annual Meeting – November 2, 2025

All are welcome! 8 Acupuncture CEUs +1 professional enhancement CEU 

📅 Date: Sunday, November 2, 2025

📍 Location: Reuben Hoar Library, Littleton, MA (35 Shattuck St, Littleton, MA 01460)

✨ CEUs available | Inspiring speakers |Lunch included | Legislative & Community Updates

REGISTER HERE

–Rates are discounted for active ASM members (login to your ASM account and renew first to be eligible for member-only rates).
–Registrations close 10/27/25.

Speaker Bios and Lecture Details

Ted Kaptchuk

Dr. Ted Kaptchuk is a professor of medicine and a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School.   He directs the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies hosted at the BIDMC. His current research focuses on placebo effects and his previous scientific and scholarly work focused on Chinese medicine.  He is the author of over 300 journal publications and The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine.   In 2023, he was awarded the William Silen Lifetime Achievement Award in Mentoring (2022) (Harvard Medical School highest teaching award).  In 2015, he was Awarded the Lifetime Award for Acupuncture Research by the Society for Acupuncture Research.  

Dr. Ted Kaptchuk’s lecture highlight:

The talk will examine the question of placebo and acupuncture from two perspectives: biomedicine and Chinese medicine.   From the biomedical perspective it will look at: the reason biomedicine ask why acupuncture is more than placebo, what are the implications of this question, and what is the status of biomedical understanding of this question.  From the Chinese medical perspective, the talk lecture will explore why this question does not exist Chinese medicine and what are the closest parallel to placebo in Chinese medicine.

Vitaly Napadow

Dr. Vitaly Napadow is a Professor at Harvard Medical School and the Director of the Schoen and Adams Discovery Center for Chronic Pain Recovery at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and the Center for Integrative Pain Neuroimaging (CiPNI) at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital. Somatosensory, cognitive, and affective factors all influence the malleable experience of chronic pain, and Dr. Napadow’s Lab has applied human functional and structural neuroimaging to localize and suggest mechanisms by which different brain circuitries modulate pain perception. Dr. Napadow’s neuroimaging research also aims to better understand how non-pharmacological therapies, from acupuncture and transcutaneous neuromodulation to cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness meditation training, ameliorate aversive perceptual states such as pain. Dr. Napadow has more than 250 publications in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, is past-President of the Society for Acupuncture Research, and was a founding member of the US Association for the Study of Pain (USASP), as well as serving on numerous conference, journal, and NIH review panels. He is a graduate of the New England School of Acupuncture.

 Dr. Napadow’s lecture will include:

The patient-acupuncturist interaction can powerfully shape treatment outcomes such as pain but is often considered an intangible “art of medicine” and has largely eluded scientific inquiry. Although brain correlates of social processes such as empathy and theory of mind have been studied using single-subject designs, specific behavioral and neural mechanisms underpinning the patient-clinician interaction are unknown. Using a two-person interactive design, we have constructed both a fMRI and EEG setup to simultaneously record hyperscan neuroimaging data from patient-clinician dyads, who interacted via live video (for fMRI) or face to face (for EEG), while clinicians treated evoked pain in patients with chronic pain. Our recently published fMRI results (Ellingsen et al., 2020, 2022, 2023) showed that patient analgesia was mediated by patient-clinician nonverbal behavioral mirroring and brain-to-brain concordance in circuitry implicated in theory of mind and social mirroring. Dyad-based analyses showed extensive dynamic coupling of these brain nodes with the partners’ brain activity, yet only in dyads with pre-established clinical rapport. These findings introduce a putatively key brain-behavioral mechanism for therapeutic alliance and psychosocial analgesia. Improving patient/clinician communication might help reduce the risk of burnout for acupuncture providers. 

Jin Ming

Dr. Jin Ming graduated from Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in 1982. After receiving her Master’s degree, she continued her doctoral studies under the mentorship of Professor Qiu Peiran, a National Master of Chinese Medicine.

In 1990, Dr. Jin came to New York, where she has been practicing in Manhattan and Queens, integrating traditional Chinese medicine (herbal medicine, acupuncture, and Tuina) with modern clinical settings. She emphasis the root of classical TCM foundation while skillfully integrate with modern research. Since 1996, as a renowned figure in fertility field, she has collaborated with hospitals on integrative clinical studies,  including:

• The role of Chinese herbs and acupuncture in supporting IVF outcomes,
• Acupuncture for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy,
• Acupuncture for post-surgical scar absorption and wound recovery.

Her guiding principle is to apply TCM’s holistic perspective, pattern differentiation, and combined therapeutic methods (acupuncture, herbs, tuina, in conjunction with Western medicine) for better clinical effectiveness. She also strives to articulate the essence of TCM theory and clinical practice from a modern medical perspective, helping many physicians to better understand and gradually embrace Chinese medicine and apply them to benefit more patients.

Her featured lecture in gynecology is titled:
 “Acupuncture and Traditional Chinese Medicine as Supportive Therapies in IVF.”
With over 30 years of clinical experience, Dr. Jin will present both Eastern and Western perspectives on how acupuncture and TCM can support various IVF protocols—improving success rates, reducing side effects, and offering practical insights for clinical application. Her teaching approach emphasizes clarity and conciseness, making complex concepts easier to grasp and directly applicable.

The lecture has four parts:

1. Overview of reproductive physiology and pathology in infertility from both TCM and Western medicine perspectives
2. Key herbal formulas and acupuncture points in TCM treatment of infertility
3. Applications of acupuncture and TCM in IUI, IVF, frozen egg cycles, egg donation, and surrogacy
4. Detailed integration of acupuncture with three commonly used IVF protocols

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