ACUPUNCTURE: HOW WILL IT HELP ME?
How can acupuncture help you?
Acupuncture is one of those mysterious Asian treatments that was done thousands of years ago. So how can it help you, here in America, today?
Acupuncture has stood the test of time for millennia for a good reason: it works. And it works for an amazing number of diseases and conditions: pain, fatigue, dizziness, alcohol and other drug addictions, ulcers, PMS, depression, nausea, and others. Since it is imbalance and blocked energy flow that is treated rather than specific health issues, acupuncture can theoretically provide relief for nearly any ailment or disease.
You don’t even need to have an actual disease for it to be useful. You can use it the way you would give your car a tune-up before it develops problems.
A root cause approach
The Center for Advanced Medicine believes in treating any health problem by getting at the root cause. Simplified, the root cause of any disease is one or more of three things:
- Too much bad stuff, such as toxins
- Not enough good stuff, such as nutrients
- Imbalance of some sort in the body
Once these things are identified and taken care of and we essentially get out of our own way, the body usually does a good job of healing itself.
Although the first two things in the above list, toxins and nutrition, will still need to be addressed, acupuncture is one of the ways to correct an imbalance in the body.
One of the seven steps back to health is aligning and balancing body systems, so acupuncture is part of that approach as well.
What exactly is acupuncture?
Acupuncture is a major part of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). It has been, and is still, used by many millions of people, and not just in China. The basic premise of acupuncture and the related treatment acupressure is that when energy is blocked within the body, it can cause body systems to function less than optimally. Acupuncture treatments stimulate points on the twelve energy pathways, called meridians, within the body. This stimulation helps to restore proper energy flow and balance to the body so it can more effectively heal itself.
How does the practitioner know which points to treat?
The practitioner of acupuncture evaluates imbalances in the patient’s body, using tools of observation such as tongue diagnosis, pulse diagnosis, and questioning the patient. The person’s symptoms can also provide valuable information as to what is going on. But, unlike Western medicine, diagnosing the disease itself isn’t the focus of acupuncture. The practitioner puts together all of the information gathered to assess the patterns of imbalance and to treat the patient accordingly.
How does it actually work?
There are a number of theories about how and why acupuncture works. It is believed that it works on the nervous system, but also affects the immune system and blood flow. Part of the problem in understanding acupuncture is that it is based on an entirely different way of looking at health compared with the Western medicine approach. It’s kind of like trying to understand Greek by studying Spanish.
Another way of looking at it, though, is that it doesn’t matter how it works. It does.
Is there any down side to acupuncture?
Since acupuncture works with energy and doesn’t try to force the body into doing something the way drugs will – in fact, nothing actually enters the body – there is really no down side. Nothing is cut, nothing is removed, allergy to the treatment isn’t possible, and no irreversible changes are made. At worst, acupuncture won’t help, but unlike many medical treatments it won’t harm. Sterile disposable needles are used, so infection wouldn’t be an issue.
Acupuncture is not a common Western treatment. Is it scientific?
Some in Western medicine scoff at the theory of meridians, mostly because the whole idea is unfamiliar. However, there is scientific evidence of the existence of these pathways and points. Modern instrumentation can pick up areas of changed electrical resistance at major acupuncture points which were diagrammed thousands of years before such instrumentation was even invented. Other tests and scientific studies show that acupuncture, rather than being about the flow of mysterious energies, is a reproducible physical phenomenon.
It’s not about the placebo effect, either, since it works in both babies and animals that would have no expectations about results. In other words, the results are real, not imagined.
Is there any preparation for an acupuncture treatment?
No. You might have to sit or lie down with the needles in place for a while, so it might be useful to have something to read or do while waiting.
