What do the needles do?
They reduce inflammation. They release the body’s natural painkillers: endorphins, norepinephrine and enkephalin. Some of these substances are 10-200 times more potent than morphine! They increase blood flow to an area, and they sedate the sympathetic nervous system allowing for healing and homeostasis.
Why are you putting a needle in my elbow when my knee hurts?
We’re tricking your nervous system. The body is an intricate map of meridians along which we needle and certain points that are distant from the pain or injury do indeed affect far-off places in the body. Sometimes we chase the pain down and out a limb, sometimes we confuse the nervous system so it can no longer send pain signals to your brain, and sometimes we needle directly at the site of pain to draw an immune response to the area full of healing macrophages and other white blood cells on a clean-up mission.
How many treatments will I need?
The honest answer to this question is I don’t know. It’s the elephant in the room in all of medicine. We can make very educated guesses based on past experience, and current knowledge of your body, but some people react very quickly to acupuncture and some people react slowly. You’ll get your best answer after about 4 treatments. Some clients come to us with issues they’ve had their whole lives and some with acute conditions. Obviously, the more acute your symptoms the less healing time required. I generally ask my patients to give the treatments a good three months. This is how long it takes to change the body. You wouldn’t expect to see faster results if you went to the gym or went on a diet, and acupuncture is the same. You will know very quickly if it working for you, but to get ahead and shift into maintenance treatments always takes a good 3-6 months. After this acupuncture becomes something is used as preventative medicine, and many of our patients have been coming in for treatments their whole lives to help move stress through the body and provide optimal immunity and health.
I’m scared of needles.
This is not a question, but a very common belief. I am scared of needles too, hypodermic needles, and so should you be. Hypodermic needles encountered when having blood drawn, IV inserted, etc. are serrated so they tear the skin going in and out causing pain and bleeding. No one likes these needles so we don’t use them. We use hair thin stainless steel, single-use disposable needles. They literally slip between the tissues upon insertion so you won’t experience pain or bleeding. Instead you experience the release of endorphins and relaxation.
My medication has a label on it that says not to mix with herbs.
The label is generic, and cannot cover anything specific or useful. For example, there are over 10,000 herbs, and many of them are food and perfectly fine to take with medications, such as fresh ginger, green onion, rice, wheat, tea etc. Basically, when something is so general it really loses its value. Having said that there are some cautions to exercise in certain cases. We are trained and licensed to administer our herbal medicine and in this training is included precautions for herb drug interactions. Just as I am not qualified to say when and how your western pharmaceuticals are administered, neither is your western pharmacist qualified to make the call as to how Chinese Herbal Medicine is administered.
