Acupuncture
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Acupuncture is an ancient Chinese healing technique that treats an enormously wide range of conditions by helping to balance your body. Acupuncture is renowned for its ability to relieve pain, soothe anxiety and stress, and help alleviate many common and uncommon symptoms and illnesses.
Acupuncture is defined as "an originally Chinese practice of inserting fine needles through the skin at specific points especially to cure disease or relieve pain" - Merriam-Webster |
How does it work?
Thousands of years ago, Chinese medical practitioners discovered that by stimulating certain points they could elicit a desired medical effect elsewhere in the body. What we have today is a map of interconnected acupuncture points arranged along pathways, called meridians, found to stimulate the body in specific ways.
In order to understand how acupuncture works, you have to look past the linear model of western medicine and examine the body as a web of intricately intertwined actions and reactions. Through this approach, we can get away from treating a "disease" and begin to repair the mechanisms that led to the disease is the first place. Think of it as reprogramming the body's natural ability to heal itself. The majority of what we think of as an "illness" is nothing more than the symptoms brought on by an illness. The key to truly healing is to restore balance to the body. These imbalances are what allowed the illness to take hold in the first place. Once a diagnosis is reached, points are then selected that best achieve the goals of reducing symptomatology, eliminating the illness, and restoring balance to the body. This helps to prevent other illnesses from invading and creating more problems.
In order to understand how acupuncture works, you have to look past the linear model of western medicine and examine the body as a web of intricately intertwined actions and reactions. Through this approach, we can get away from treating a "disease" and begin to repair the mechanisms that led to the disease is the first place. Think of it as reprogramming the body's natural ability to heal itself. The majority of what we think of as an "illness" is nothing more than the symptoms brought on by an illness. The key to truly healing is to restore balance to the body. These imbalances are what allowed the illness to take hold in the first place. Once a diagnosis is reached, points are then selected that best achieve the goals of reducing symptomatology, eliminating the illness, and restoring balance to the body. This helps to prevent other illnesses from invading and creating more problems.
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In the early 2000's, The World Health Organization released a meta analysis of numerous clinical trials indicating various conditions shown to be treatable by acupuncture. You can download the full report here.
Shortly after, the British Acupuncture Council released a condensed version of the findings which have been listed below. You can download the full article here. |
Conditions Treatable with Acupuncture.
Abdominal pain
Adverse reactions to radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy Alcohol dependence and detoxification Allergic rhinitis (including hay fever) Bell’s palsy Bronchial asthma Cholelithiasis Depression Diabetes mellitus, non-insulin-dependent Dysentery, acute bacillary Dysmenorrhoea, primary Earache Facial pain (including craniomandibular disorders) Fibromyalgia Headache Hypertension, essential Hypotension, primary Induction of labor Infertility Insomnia Knee pain |
Low back pain
Malposition of fetus, correction of (breech baby) Male sexual dysfunction Morning sickness Nausea and vomiting Neck pain Osteoarthritis Periarthritis of shoulder Polycystic ovary syndrome (Stein–Leventhal syndrome) Postoperative pain Premenstrual syndrome Prostatitis, chronic Renal colic Rheumatoid arthritis Sciatica Sore throat (including tonsillitis) Sprain Stiff neck Stroke Tennis elbow ...and more. |