Dr. Arya Nielsen, an American acupuncturist in practice for over thirty years, was taught in the classical lineage of Dr. James Tin Yau So. She graduated in the first class of the first acupuncture college in the United States in 1977. She is a practitioner, teacher, author, and researcher and is considered the Western world authority on the traditional East Asian technique gua sha. She developed and directs the Gua Sha Certification Course. Dr. Nielsen has an academic research doctorate and a faculty appointment at the New York Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center, where she founded the first hospital-based acupuncture fellowship for inpatient care through the Department of Integrative Medicine. She teaches internationally on topics related to East Asian medicine and integrative medicine and is the Chair of the Policy Working Group for the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine & Health, the 70-plus North American member organization of academic medical centers and health systems that support utilization of evidence-based nonpharmacologic therapies as integrative medical care. She served on a 2014 Joint Commission Stakeholder Panel on pain that led to their clarification the next year that nonpharmacologic therapies should be included in treatment strategies.
