About Acupuncture

Reduced to its simplest, acupuncture is the millenia-old practice of inserting sterile, hair-fine needles at specific points in the body to strengthen, stimulate and relieve symptoms of disease. But here’s what you really want to know: 

Do you feel it? Yes. 

Does it hurt? No. It feels weird, like no other feeling you’ve had before, but it’s not an “ouch feeling.” 

If you are “afraid of needles” should you still try it? Totally. More often than not the “scared patient” is the first to fall asleep once the needles are in and then be surprised by how relaxing the whole thing was. 

Is it weird to stick needles in your body for health and serenity? Sure. It’s really weird. I’m the first to admit it. However, the fact that it has been treating patients on nearly every continent for at least 4000 years (compared to Western medicine’s 100 years) speaks to its efficacy.

Do you need to be sick and broken to benefit from acupuncture? While acupuncture can be incredibly effective at treating symptoms, the ideal acupuncture patient actually has no “symptoms” and wants to stay that way.

The gist is: Energy (or “qi” if you like) is constantly moving through the body (blood is a thicker form of this energy), and when it circulates properly, we don’t feel it. But when it gets blocked or becomes deficient, it causes pain, dysfunction, depression and disease. Pain is actually energy and blood that have stagnated. During treatment, when an acupuncture needle is inserted, it doesn’t hurt but the brain recognizes “something is happening” and sends blood to the insertion point to investigate, triggering the inflammatory response andcirculating oxygen, minerals, and resources both to the point of insertion and to other areas that may help the body recover. That’s what acupuncture does: it speeds up the healing process through hyper-circulating blood to where it needs to go.

That said: acupuncture is more than just treating pain.

Acupuncture requires patients to look at health from a different perspective. Many of us are used to conventional medicine which focuses on what’s sick and broken, on killing the pathogen; you go to the doctor when “the bad thing happens” and they put you back to how you were before, and the entire medical inquiry–health itself–is always relative to the bad thing, essentially and metaphorically preventing death. It’s great at this and I’m thankful for it. However, there are other outlooks on what medicine can and should do.

I prefer to think of “health” as relative to life. How do we live more fully and deliberately? How do we pay better attention to what our bodies are asking for? Can we assume that pain or sickness is not just an inconvenience to be vanquished but rather curriculum begging to be acknowledged and learned. At the risk of being very annoying, I truly believe that the only reason we are here is for self-discovery and curiosity, meeting each other in the great field of learning.

Making “ouch-ies” go away is only one part in the full arc of taking responsibility for our lives, recognizing that the fulfillment of our life’s curriculum is entirely in our own hands and that we get no rough drafts, letting go of what we can with ease and finding the way forward with as much joy as possible. This is what medicine should aim to encourage.

Every now and then I come across someone who declares they “don’t believe in acupuncture.” While everyone is entitled to their opinion, I do like to remind these *fun people that canine acupuncture has been repeatedly proven effective and none of the dogs claim they believe in it either. Fortunately for them, acupuncture doesn’t require a person’s (or puppy’s) belief.

And fortunately for you and me, the World Health Organization lists the following symptoms, diseases and conditions to be treated effectively by acupuncture:

Musculo-Skeletal

  • Arthritis

  • Back Pain

  • Neck Pain

  • Muscle Pain

  • Muscle Weakness

  • Muscle Cramping

  • Sciatica

Digestive

  • Abdominal Pain

  • Constipation

  • Diarrhea

  • Indigestion

Gynecological

  • Premenstrual Syndrome

  • Menopausal Symptoms

  • Infertility

Emotional

  • Anxiety

  • Depression

  • Insomnia

  • Nervousness

  • Neurosis

Eye-Ear-Nose-Throat

  • Cataracts

  • Poor Vision

  • Toothache

  • Gingivitis

  • Tinnitus

Respiratory

  • Asthma, Bronchitis

  • Common Cold, Sinusitis

  • Smoking Cessation

  • Tonsilitis

Neurological

  • Headaches

  • Migraines

  • Neurogenic Bladder Dysfunction

  • Parkinson’s Disease

  • Post-Operative Pain

  • Stroke

Miscellaneous

  • Addiction Control

  • Athletic Performance

  • Blood Pressure Regulation

  • Chronic Fatigue

  • Immune System Toning

  • Stress Reduction